


No Church In The Wild

by slacktension



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-13
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 21:43:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 44,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slacktension/pseuds/slacktension
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration of Mako and Bolin's childhoods, from life with their parents up to the start of the series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Summertime

Mako’s first memory was of his parents tucking him into bed.  
  
He could remember reaching up towards his father with his small hands, sitting on the kitchen floor for whatever reason. He was laughing and so was his father, while his mother blew out the lights. He could remember a time before electricity came to their neighborhood.  
  
His father bent down - he was impossibly tall, a giant - picked him up from under his arms and settled him over his shoulder.  
  
“Like a sack of potatoes,” his father boomed, rocking him back and forth while Mako shrieked with a laugh.  
  
“Honey, stop, you’ll scare him.”  
  
“Aw, he’s fine.”  
  
His father started walking down the hall and up the short, steep staircase. This did scare Mako, as it felt like he was falling backwards over his father’s shoulder, his arms dangling. It was a strange sense of vertigo to be traveling up while the ground below tipped down. His father moved up with a flame in his free hand, making the downstairs half of their apartment disappear into a black abyss. The stuff of nightmares.  
  
It stopped being terrifying when his mother fell into line behind them, holding a candle and smiling up at him with her round green eyes.   
  
—-

  
In the hospital when his little brother was born, he was free to wander around as he pleased. His father was busy talking to nurses about taking care of the baby while his mother took a bath.  
  
Mako wasn’t jealous yet. He was interested in the glass I.V. drip suspended from a metal pole on wheels, the brand new radio on the bedside table, the flowers his father brought in laying forgotten on top of a tray that housed various surgical knives and utensils. The radio spouted off a drama and Mako grimaced as the romantic leads started kissing.  
  
He crawled onto his mother’s hospital bed, careful to not let the soles of his shoes track dirt onto the clean, white sheets. A complimentary bar of soap was resting on her abandoned pillow, wrapped in wax paper and sealed with a sticker.  
  
Mako held it, took the sticker off, and pressed it to the center of his shirt front.  
  
Nurses and doctors walked into the room on occasion, one even shutting off the radio, another wheeling away the tray with surgical tools, but no one paid Mako any mind.  
  
—-  
  
He loved his little brother, but that didn’t mean he had to enjoy every second with him.  
  
Their father was at work and their mother was visiting another apartment to make use of a neighbor’s loom. Mako was in charge.  
  
He stood and leaned against the side of his brother’s playpen. Bolin was wailing up at him, round face red and shining wet with snot and tears, the white pop of his first tooth visible through his gums. Mako watched him with curiosity.  
  
Bolin stood up and lifted his arms to his older brother, still crying, opening and closing his hands to beg to be taken out of the playpen.  
  
Mako, always tall for his age, climbed over the wall of the playpen to get inside.  
  
He stood and looked at Bolin. His little brother’s loud sobs stilled, eyes still gleaming with tears and rolling down his fat cheeks.  
  
Then Mako climbed right back out just to show Bolin that he was bigger and taller and better at getting out of playpens than he’d ever be.  
  
Bolin started crying again.  
  
—-  
  
By the time Bolin was a year old, Mako’s jealousy started sinking in. It was all,  _look he’s walking, he’s saying Mama!_  and Mako really didn’t understand why these things were special. He could do both already.  
  
He had felt Bolin crawl out of their shared bed, thumping his feet to the floor and leaving the room. Mako stayed still and pretended to be asleep.  
  
Moments later he heard the door to his parents’ bedroom open, and coos following at the sight of Bolin toddling into the room.  
  
He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, seeing nothing but pitch black in the small bedroom. There were no windows, no source of light; they had to feel around in the dark. Mako could see why his brother would leave the room. Even he was frightened.  
  
Darkness like that was tangible. Nothing could be so solid and black without existing, of having some mark on the world. But that made it all the more frightening. The dark didn’t exist, not _really_ , and usually Mako would turn to his father to ward it off.  
  
But now his father and mother were preoccupied with Bolin.  
  
Mako cupped his hands together and thought of warmth and light, breathing in and out with low breaths like he was still asleep.  
  
The flame appeared to burn above his hands slow and steady. The dark was gone and Mako could see his hands, his arms, his body safely tucked into bed all cast in burnt orange light.  
  
Careful to not disrupt the flames, he followed the path Bolin had made before him. He pushed open his parents bedroom door to find Bolin held in the air by his father, everyone laughing.  
  
The laughter stopped when Mako lifted his hands higher.  
  
“Mom, Dad, look.”  
  
—-  
  
“We’ll send him to one of those schools on Netsu Ave,” his mother said.  
  
Mako sat on the kitchen floor and tossed flames from his left hand into his right. He was trying to teach himself to juggle.  
  
“School? We’re not sending him to a school, I’ll teach him,” his father replied, seated at the kitchen table.  
  
“You don’t have the time for it.”  
  
“My father taught me.”  
  
“I learned from a school, it’s perfectly normal.”  
  
“Can we talk about this later?”  
  
Mako started juggling two balls of flames from one hand to the next, creating a high reaching arch above his head.  
  
“At this rate,” his mother said, pursing her lips in distaste as the flames reached her height. “He might be able to teach himself.”  
  
—-  
  
Mako and Bolin sat on their father’s lap awkwardly, leaning over the kitchen table and staring down at the newspaper. Bolin pat his hand at the text on the right page, gurgling and pretending to read.  
  
The grey photograph of a pudgy girl, standing before a hut made out of snow, glared back at Mako. Her eyes were so light that the lense of the camera couldn’t capture the right shade of blue, instead turning it to a boring, dull grey. She was barefoot and standing in the snow. She challenged the world with her fist extended and bottom lip jutting with a pout.  
  
“That’s her,” their mother said, leaning behind her three boys, pointing out the image for Bolin’s sake. “That’s our Avatar.”  
  
Mako didn’t care about the Avatar or Korra or that weird girl in the photographs, whose name they spouted over the radio all day.  
  
His father had the day off from work and they had dinner with their neighbors, the evening turning into a loud, raucous celebration. The Avatar had been found and Mako got to spend the day with his family because of it.  
  
—-  
  
The first day of the summer solstice was the biggest holiday their family celebrated, right next to the spring solstice. Mako preferred the summer.  
  
People like his father - with amber eyes and red shirts - would pull out blood red flags and hang them from their apartment windows. Emblazoned on the front were yellow saffron flames. Not everybody in their neighborhood put out these flags.  
  
“Why do we have flags but other people don’t?” Mako asked.  
  
His mother leaned out their window, tying the tattered corners of their flag to the windowsill. She pulled her head back in and smiled down at him, holding out her free hand while the other held the flag in place.  
  
Mako turned to Bolin at his side. Bolin handed him a piece of ribbon, which Mako handed to their mother.  
  
“Daddy’s family was from the Fire Nation. Fire Nation people celebrate the summer solstice.”  
  
“Oh,” Mako said. “And we celah—celah-braid-”  
  
“ _Celebrate_.”  
  
“We  _celebrate_  the spring solstice, too.”  
  
“Yes,” his mother pulled out of the window and stood, smiling down at the flag. Mako could see the wind lift it and billow into his view. “Because my family was from the Earth Kingdom.”  
  
“But not everybody celebrates both.”  
  
His mother looked down at him with a sad smile. “That’s right.”  
  
—-  
  
The summer solstice meant fireworks in the streets and his father would take him into Huangse Town, to the butcher shop there to buy a suckling pig. The people in Huangse Town knew how to celebrate the summer solstice.  
  
 _Everything_  was dripping with red and gold and orange and yellow. People dressed in grand silk robes and family heirloom jewelry from the old country. Mako clung close to his father’s legs when a line of people would come by dressed as a dragon, puppet mouth clapping open and shut, sparkling eyelids flickering as it zeroed in on him.  
  
His mother would roast the pig until it came out of the oven with crispy, caramelized skin. It was the biggest meal they had all year.  
  
—-  
  
The spring solstice was more calm. His mother would take him and Bolin down to Little Wugou neighborhood, where the streets were lined in carts full of flowers and sweet desserts. Perfume filled the air along with stray flower petals. There was light candies and sweets outside every corner shop, where people dressed in jade green with elaborate jeweled ornaments.  
  
It was nice, until a shop owner looked into Mako’s amber eyes and tossed him the meanest look he had ever seen.   
  
His mother, in response, shifted her foot across the ground and knocked over an entire display of red bean cakes, grabbed her boys by their wrists, and quickly fled the store.  
  
After that year, his mother didn’t take him to Little Wugou anymore.  
  
—-  
  
“We celebrate the spring solstice to honor children,” his mother said before every spring solstice meal.  
  
The meals were more simple, seasonal dishes, quick to cook and even quicker to eat. There were stir fried vegetables, wiggling blocks of tofu, fresh salads with purple flowers speckled among the green. Even though he wasn’t supposed to be eating while his mother said thanks, Bolin shoveled cold buckwheat noodles into his mouth with his pudgy hands.  
  
“Boys,” his mother said, grabbing their attention. They looked to her and she smiled. “Here, at this part in the festivities, the oldest person in the family hands the youngest a garland of flowers.”  
  
Their father handed Bolin a long string of yellow marigolds. Before his dirty hands could clasp around them, Mako reached out and brushed the rest of the noodles from his fingers.  
  
The garland was wrapped around Bolin’s neck and he wore it for the rest of the day, even as he plucked out bunches of petals and ran around with the neighborhood kids outside.  
  
—-  
  
Everyone had big families. Mako didn’t have a big family. It was him, his mother, his father, and his brother.  
  
The neighbors across the hall had the biggest family Mako had ever seen. Each day it felt like new family members were arriving with strange blue bags and white furs strapped to their backs. Their father would remark,  _another WOP is living next door. Let’s hope this one smells better._  
  
Miss Una lived across the hall, the woman of the house. She had five children and often babysat Mako and Bolin when their parents were busy. She was one of the most beautiful women anyone had ever seen: despite her tattered clothing, she always dressed nicely, twisting her hair into intricate braids.   
  
Mako and Bolin were always introduced to the new family members each time they stayed. Everyone was a cousin, everyone slept cramped in twin beds, even squished on the floor. Babies slept in the kitchen drawers pulled out to make makeshift beds. Everyone had blue eyes.  
  
Their father’s eyes were amber. Their mother’s were green. No one else had both like Mako and Bolin did.  
  
Everyone had big families.  
  
Mako and Bolin didn’t have grandparents with green eyes or uncles with amber. There were no aunts or cousins. It was odd.  
  
—-  
  
By the time Bolin was five, and still not bending anything, their father was convinced he was a nonbender.  
  
“We were all early benders in my family,” his father said, bouncing Bolin on his knee. Bolin laughed and laughed, not caring about the topic of conversation.   
  
Mako sat on a chair and kept extending his thumb up and down, similar to the way he had seen the Water Tribe men in Miss Una’s apartment flick their steel lighters on and off. A flame burned at the end of his thumb, then died away, then came back, then died away.  
  
“I still think he has it in him,” his mother said from her seat on the couch. She was stitching up their father’s finest shirt. He had a job interview tomorrow.  
  
Their father spun Bolin around, still giggling, and tickled him at his sides. Bolin shrieked with joy.  
  
“Can you bend, Bolin?” he asked.  
  
“D-da-daddy, stop!” he said through his laughter.  
  
Their father laughed and stilled his fingers. Bolin instantly moved forward and latched onto his neck, burying his face into the red scarf wound there, snorting with the last of his giggles. His father relaxed, smoothly patting his back.  
  
“Well, at least he’ll grow up in Dragon Flats,” their father said. “He was born in the right place.”  
  
—-  
  
The kids in the neighborhood played with Bolin more than Mako.  
  
Mako was never one to make friends as quickly as Bolin did; not only was he never very good at it, he also felt little inclination to. He was one of the few kids stuck at an odd age in their neighborhood, too young to roam with the older kids, and too old to consider being friends with anyone Bolin’s age. He usually relied on playing with Bolin’s new friends whenever a game had been started, slipping in when there was no need for introductions or that terrible, timid question of, _“_ _do you want to be friends?”_  
  
When Mako did try, he waited. He played by himself and when other kids would edge near, he would extend an invitation to play.  
  
After a while, it was rare that kids would edge near.  
  
“I don’t think your friends like me,” Mako whispered to Bolin one day, standing close to each other in a line-up to be divided into teams for a game of kickball.  
  
“Yeah they do! E’rybody likes you, Mako,” Bolin said back, smile gapped with missing teeth but still bright and never broken.  
  
There was an odd number of kids. Mako felt his palms sweat and itch with heat by his sides as it came down to him and the boy one block down who had suffered from polio, and had limited use of his legs.  
  
They picked the other boy and told Mako that it would be unfair to have him on a team.  
  
“Yeah,” one girl said. “It’d be uneven and you already got something we don’t.”  
  
“What?” Mako asked quietly.  
  
“You’re a firebender.”  
  
—-  
  
After that, it made sense to Mako why his father trained him in the alley beside their house after the sun went down.  
  
When one of Mako’s attempts at throwing fire ran astray, catching on the garbage spilling from an unlidded trashcan, he stumbled back with fear and accidentally controlled the flames to grow higher.  
  
His father was right behind him, placing a calming hand on his shoulder, breathing deeply. The flames died as he exhaled.  
  
Mako felt like a failure. He sunk to the ground and curled his arms around his bent knees, hiding his head even as his father asked him what was wrong.  
  
“I don’t wanna do that again,” Mako mumbled, sniffling.  
  
“You don’t want to firebend again?”  
  
“No, I don’t -” Mako paused and wondered what he wanted. Without knowing, he kept silent. It was always easier than answering.  
  
“Mako, look at me.”  
  
It took his father’s hand at his shoulder to finally bring his head up. He saw flames dancing in his father’s palm, warm and comforting as always. Pulsing with movement and heat from the heart of him, sparked in the air and pushing out into the world. It was light in the dark when the electricity died and heat in the winter when the radiator broke.  
  
“Fire is life, Mako. You hold it in your hands every time you bend. Remember that.”  
  
Mako held out his cupped hands and allowed his father to give him the flames. They stuttered with a pulse.  
  
He didn’t understand what his father meant, but he felt better.  
  
—-  
  
Whenever his parents fought, Mako knew it was about  _their_  parents. The grandparents he never knew.  
  
When a fight would spark, his mother would tell the boys to go to bed. No matter what time of day too, but Mako saw the way the dirt on the floor hovered in the air and knew better than to question her.   
  
“I can’t believe you asked your mother for money.”  
  
“I had to, we have two boys to feed!”  
  
“What did you tell her this time? That I can’t hold down a job because of my weak knee? Or is it some new lie?”  
  
“I didn’t  _lie,_  I told her the truth!”  
  
“And what did she say, about our boys? Does she want to see her grandchildren now? Or wait another seven years?”  
  
Mako and Bolin would tug the blankets from their bed to create a fort, crawl underneath the bed frame, and hide in the dark. Even though he wasn’t allowed to firebend around Bolin, he did so anyway, creating enough light to let Bolin make shadow puppets with his fingers against the underside of their bed.  
  
—-  
  
Their mother had a surname. She was always called  _Ms. Wen_ _,_  as if everyone knew her already. She would laugh and correct them, asking to be called by her first name alone, but no one ever did. Sometimes people would refer to the boys as  _Mako Wen_  and  _Bolin Wen_  but his mother would correct them, too.  
  
“Oh, no, no surname for the boys,” she said, with a tight lipped smile.  
  
They rarely saw her bend. Their father always remarked that her talents were great, but all they ever saw was her stripping dirt from the floors, closing her hands into tight fists and tugging dust from the rugs.   
  
She was all contrasts. A soft voice and round face, oval, green eyes, thick black hair. She moved with grace and, on occasion, wore fine jewelry for special events, or for no reason at all. She took pride in the cleaning of her home, her own appearance, and the boys’ clothing.  
  
But she had rough hands. She walked barefoot wherever she went, tugging on a spare pair of black slippers before stepping into stores. While she painted her face, her fingernails stayed unadorned, dirt visible under them. People stared when they noticed her dirty fingers. Mako didn’t like that.  
  
He also didn’t like it when people instantly knew Bolin was her son, but stared at Mako as if they had no idea where he came from.  
  
“This is my first son,” his mother would always say with pride, running her hand over his short hair. He would lean into her touch and press against her legs like Bolin did.  
  
—-  
  
Once Mako woke from a nap to find a strange old woman sitting at their kitchen table, talking to their mother.  
  
“I can’t believe you live here, Nuan,” she said, looking around the room with distaste.  
  
His mother continued vigorously cleaning the dishes. “Maybe I wouldn’t have to if you got over your hatred.”  
  
“Maybe I would not have this hatred if it were not for your stubborn disobedience.”  
  
His mother tossed her cleaning rag into the sink, soapy water splashing up and wetting the front of her dress. She spun around and glared at the woman.  
  
“I cannot believe you still think my marriage is based on  _spite_ ,” she shouted.  
  
The woman jerked her head around nervously, eyes darting back to the living room. Mako noticed her eyes were green. Exactly the same shade as his mother’s. As his brother’s.  
  
“Mind your temper,” the old woman hissed. “I don’t want to wake the children.”  
  
 _“Get out.”_  
  
—-  
  
His father always came home from work, no matter what job he had, sweaty and smelling like smoke. He would hug his mother despite her playful yells of protest,  _don’t, don’t hug me, you reak!_  and the boys would laugh until he engulfed them in smelly hugs.  
  
“If I could just perfect my lightningbending, I could get a steady job at the plant,” he sighed, leaning back on the couch.  
  
“If you can find the time to practice, it would be a great idea,” their mother said softly, wiping his brow with a wet cloth.  
  
His father jerked his head up and kissed her chin. “Nah. I’d rather train Mako.”  
  
—-  
  
Sometimes his father would come home with surprise gifts. Mako was always excited but partially guilty whenever receiving them, because his mother seemed torn between acceptance and refusal.  
  
Once his father snuck into the apartment, pressing his finger to his lips to quiet the giddy boys at the kitchen table, creeping up behind their mother at the sink. In between his fingers was a simple, but beautiful, gold necklace.  
  
“I got you something,” he said calmly and the boys erupted with laughter when their mother dropped a plate to the floor in shock.  
  
“ _Don’t_  scare me like that -!” she spun around, eyes wide but trying to move past her shock to scold him.  
  
Their father smiled and held the necklace out to her between his fingers. “Aw, you can’t stay mad at me for long, can you?”  
  
Their mother’s mouth closed. She blinked and stared at the necklace, wanting to touch it, but holding back and frowning when she met their father’s eyes.  
  
“Where did you get that?”  
  
Their father’s smile never faltered. “It’s just a little gift. Go on, let me put it on you.”  
  
“How much did it cost?”  
  
“Honey, I bought it, it’s taken care of. Now, please,” he said, pressing a kiss to her temple. “A neck as pretty as yours should have something pretty around it.”  
  
She sighed and smiled, spinning around and lifting her hair from her neck.  
  
—-  
  
Mako attended to the local school when a man in a fancy suit came to the door to tell his mother that he wasn’t getting a proper education under her roof.  
  
His mother tripped the man on the way out the door but two days later, Mako was attending the small school up the street where few kids attended. On his first day, the class attendance was fifteen children. By the end of the week it had whittled down to seven on a good day.  
  
The girl he sat next to with grey blue eyes started wearing longer sleeves and brushing her hair over her eyes. Mako leaned forward to try and get a better look at her, not only because of her new appearance, but also because he thought she was pretty.  
  
“Mako, stop staring a Suha and finish your work,” the teacher chided.  
  
Mako blushed and the girl instantly turned her face to look at him, shocked. Her right eye was puffy and mottled black and blue.  
  
—-  
  
At recess he found out that her father got angry sometimes. There were more bruises on her arms and legs.  
  
“What’s your Dad like?” she asked, scraping her fingers in the dirt.  
  
Mako did the same, drawing nonsensical patterns there. “He’s like me.”  
  
She giggled. “Does he have a job? Mine doesn’t.”  
  
Mako nodded. “Yeah. He got a new job at Ryouta’s.”  
  
“The restuarant?”  
  
“Uh huh.”  
  
“He’s a firebender?”  
  
Mako smiled and nodded again, watching his finger bump against small rocks as it dragged in the earth. “Yup. Like me.”  
  
Suha stood up and ran across the yard. Mako sat and watched the long sleeves flap in the wind like useless wings at her sides.  
  
—-  
  
Mako and Bolin sat in front of the radio and gazed up at it in silent awe, their parents together on the couch, watching with amusement.  
  
 _“…_ _and the Owlcat’s move into Gorillagoat territory and - oh, there goes to buzzer folks, this round goes to the Owlcat’s!”_  
  
Bolin stood to cheer, tumbling over Mako’s back but he didn’t mind. He was just too happy that the team they had been rooting for was winning, and turned around to playfully wrestle with his brother.  
  
“Boys, no fighting!” Their mother called.  
  
“Aw, they’re just having fun, relax,” their father said.  
  
“No, Bolin might hit his head on the coffee table.”  
  
Their father sighed. “Fine. Boys!”  
  
The brothers froze and Mako broke the weak headlock Bolin had tried to put him in. The match continued but their father now held their attention.  
  
“What do you say to going to a pro-bending match?”  
  
The wrestling continued with more fervor and even louder shouts of excitement, causing their mother to roll her eyes and their father to laugh.  
  
“We don’t have the money,” she hissed.  
  
“I’ll save up.”  
  
—-  
  
Mako and Bolin watched the jar on the kitchen counter, labeled  _Pro-bending Fund_ _,_  rise with metal coins and the rare paper yuan and fall.   
  
“Not this season,” their mother would sigh, dipping her hand into the jar to scrape up the last of the coins. “Did you have to get their hopes up?”  
  
Their father ignored her and leaned close. “I will get you boys into that arena, mark my words.”  
  
—-  
  
On their first trip to the movies, Mako and Bolin both kept running ahead of their parents, the air crackling with the promise of something new. Their parents kept yelling for them to stop, wait, and catch up.  
  
It got to the point where their father was so annoyed that he tugged his scarf from his neck and knelt down, motioning for the boys to come close.  
  
He looped the scarf around their shoulders and tied the ends into a thick, special knot.  
  
“There,” he said, roughly patting them both on the shoulders, accidentally knocking them together. “Now you won’t get separated.”  
  
“ _Dad_ _,_ ” Mako whined as Bolin tried to run off, effectively choking him.  
  
His father stood with a shrug, his mother leaning into his side with a smile. “Hey, you knuckleheads are the ones that keep running off. At least now I know you’ll have each other when you get lost. Or abducted by evil spirits.”  
  
He and Bolin still ran ahead, Bolin out of excitement, and Mako partially out of spite. They moved in tandem and were impatiently waiting at the box office when their parents slowly met up with them.  
  
—-  
  
At least when one brother awoke in the middle of the night, or had difficulty sleeping, the other was there to talk to.  
  
Mako liked to burrow under the blankets, shifting them until a small cave was formed that consisted only of the brothers. It was always too dark in their room to see anything: they relied on sight and sound and memory to move about the room, to find each other.   
  
Mako held the back of his hand against the mattress and sparked the smallest flame he could manage, no smaller than the flickering of a candle. Bolin’s face lit up with the dull orange light. He relied on Mako’s bending to create warmth and light just as both boys relied on their father to bring them the same.  
  
“Fire is life, Bolin,” Mako whispered.  
  
Bolin’s fingers uncurled to reach for the flame, and Mako closed his fist quickly to snuff it out. Only when he heard Bolin’s fingers softly move against the sheets, tucking them back against his chest, did he relight the flame. Ages ago, the blanket caught on fire and while Bolin scrambled away in silent horror, Mako remained calm as his father had caught him, and with a steady hand the fire had died under his control.  
  
Bolin’s eyes flickered with the movement of the flame. “What’s earth?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“If fire is life, what’s earth?”  
  
Mako shrugged. Earth was dust and specks his mother tossed out of the house. Earth was sometimes, but not always, raised to trip up people in the streets that were rude to his mother. Sometimes it was makeshift bowls and spoons, or formed into delicate structures of animals and buildings in the park, all made by their mother’s hands for entertainment.  
  
“Earth is Mom,” Mako decided.  
  
Bolin nodded, eyes never leaving the flame. “And fire is Daddy, too.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“So we’re both.”  
  
Mako was silent. He wasn’t sure if he liked being both yet.  
  
“We’re the only people that are both,” Bolin continued.  
  
He shrugged. “The only people that we know.”  
  
“We’re Fire and Earth.”  
  
Mako thought of his mother. Of his father. Of what their elements meant and how much he loved them and his brother.  
  
“Yeah,” Mako said. “We’re both.”


	2. Chapter 1: This Bitter Earth

Find Bolin.  
  
Find Bolin.  
  
 _“Find Bolin,” Mom said in a low, hushed tone she only used when people glared at Mako in the Earth Kingdom neighborhoods, her fingers curling around his shoulder tight, so tight it hurt. He wanted to twist away but his eyes were locked on his father before them both, talking to a man in the street._

He didn’t remember the run up the hill that fed down into Dragon Flats. He remembered the feeling of running, of his lungs aching, his scraped palms stinging, the wind freezing the tear tracks running down his cheeks and drying his eyes. The sound of his thinly soled shoes slapping against the hard pavement, the repetitive record scratching of his throat sucking in air. The keys in his pocket clinking like coins. It filled the empty street with hectic noise.  
  
Ripping open the door to the apartment complex, Mako stepped into the dying burnt light of the lobby and was met with silence.

There was the metal rows of mailboxes on the wall, the piss yellow, wiry carpet, the cracks in the plaster walls. All familiar but now shown to him through a set of eyes that now took in every detail with hyperawareness, every flake of paint and every dying filament in the lightbulb above accounted for.  
  
His fingers and palm slid along the wooden railing of the staircase, the echoes of his breathing filling the stairwell with hollow sounds. The years of blackened patina salted his palm and dragged against his cuts.  
  
At the fifth floor landing he stopped, edging closer to the door at the stair’s immediate right, looking across at apartment number 49.  
  
 _Find Bolin._  
  
His fingers clenched and he fisted them into the scarf around his neck, dragging the fabric over his face and digging his clothed fingers into the corners of his eyes. The clawing scent of smoke and the peculiar stench of burning hair and flesh filled his nostrils, but he inhaled sharply to regulate his breathing, finding the smell of cologne under it all.   
  
Eyes dry and chest still heaving, Mako stepped forward and knocked on their neighbor’s door.  
  
A few scrambling sounds -  _scraping chairs and hushed hissing and some voices yelling Shh, shh, hide that!_  - seeped from the cracks in the door. A child dared to laugh. Someone was smacked with an open palm against the back of the head, and then the door pulled open to reveal tanned skin and blue eyes.  
  
Miss Una had been their neighbors since Mako could remember moving into this apartment, when he was four. She was young, pretty with her elaborate chestnut hair twisted into blue, clay beads and braids, belly swollen with the promise of another child on the way.  
  
“Hi, Miss Una,” Mako said in between breaths. “I’m here to pick up my brother.”  
  
Her lips - a deep pinkish brown - spread into a wide smile. She had all of her teeth and every last one of them was white, just like his mother’s. “Oh, right! Did you have fun at the movies?”  
  
He nodded.  
  
She turned around and pulled the door open wider, calling for Bolin. Mako looked around her legs to see her family, a grouping of people so large that Mako wondered how anyone could keep track of one another. He had been inside the apartment many times, knew that babies slept in kitchen drawers lined with blankets and pulled from their sockets, knew that the men sat around the kitchen table to speak in hushed voices with their hair long like a girl’s.   
  
A pair of children ran past the door, chasing each other, shrieking with laughter.  
  
Bolin waddled out from behind Miss Una’s legs, round face bright with a smile and the remnants of a greasy Water Tribe dinner caked across his face. Mako held out his hand and Bolin instantly took it, pressing his greased palm into the cuts inside his older brother’s.   
  
“Goodbye, boys,” Miss Una waved. “Say hello to your parents for me.”  
  
“Goodnight, Miss Una,” both boys chimed, turning around to walk to the apartment number 50.  
  
Mako looked over his shoulder as he watched Miss Una shut the door behind them, straining to listen over the sounds of his ragged breathing to hear each of her five locks click into place. Bolin started babbling about how fun it was to stay with their neighbors, even if it smelled weird, even if some of the men were scary with their whalebone knives and cigars.  
  
“Whadder you doing?” Bolin asked once Mako started to try out various keys on their father’s key ring in the door.  
  
Mako didn’t glance away from the lock. One of them fit but it didn’t budge. “I’m opening the door.”  
  
“Daddy can open the door.”  
  
“Mom asked me to open the door,” Mako replied. He grit his teeth and tried to twist the key from side to side, feeling it jiggle.   
  
“Aren’t Mommy and Daddy inside?”  
  
Mako shook his head, his fingers slipping on the key, his grasp on his brother’s hand tightening. “No.”  
  
“Where are they?”  
  
“They told me to come get you,” Mako said. He gripped onto the doorknob and jerked the key to the right, where it finally budged and he was able to open the door.  
  
He pushed it open, revealing their dark apartment, and he looked down at Bolin expecting him to toddle inside. Instead, Bolin just looked up at him with his eyes wide with confusion.  
  
“Where’s Mommy and Daddy?”  
  
Mako’s face puckered. “They told me to come get you. C’mon, we have to go to bed.”  
  
“But -”  
  
“Come on, Bolin,” Mako said, shoving his palm against his brother’s back.  
  
Bolin stumbled forward, tripped on the threshold, and he fell to the floor.  
  
His sobs were loud and instantaneous, and Mako looked over his shoulder at their neighbor’s door nervously before moving to help him. Hooking his hands under his brother’s armpits, he managed to tug Bolin inside, shutting the door with his foot.  
  
With the door shut, they were stuck in the darkness of their home, crowded on the linoleum floor of their kitchen. The small rectangular window above the kitchen sink did little to illuminate anything beyond the countertops, casting everything in a faint, moon glow grey.  
  
Mako propped Bolin to sit on the floor and Mako sat down across from him, unsure of what to do. Usually when he made Bolin cry, an adult, whether it be a neighbor babysitting or his parents, would be nearby to scold him while comforting Bolin. They would hold him and softly pat his thick, messy hair, or bounce him up and down while saying all kinds of encouraging words to put a stop to the wailing.  
  
Mako inched forward, and when he tried to wrap his arms around Bolin, his baby brother shoved him away.  
  
“Hey!” Mako shouted.  
  
Bolin shrieked, “Where’s Momma?”  
  
Mako sighed, his anger dissipating, and he rubbed his eyes. They were raw and puffy, eyelashes still a bit wet. He wanted to go to bed. He wanted to sleep and never wake up.  
  
When he tried a second time to hug his brother, Bolin caved. His cries were weaker then, fat cheek pressed against the scarf wrapped around his brother’s neck, sniffling and whimpering.  
  
“Sorry I pushed you,” Mako said, and he started patting his brother’s back.  
  
Bolin winced and pressed closer. “Too hard.”  
  
Mako paused for a moment, then with a sigh, started patting Bolin’s back with gentler movements.  
  
A moment passed as Bolin collected himself, digging his face into the scarf to wipe off his face and nose. Mako grimaced but didn’t say anything about being covered in snot.  
  
“It’s ok,” Bolin said. “You didn’t mean it, right?”  
  
“No, I didn’t.”  
  
Bolin started another high pitched whine. “Where’s Mommy and Daddy?”  
  
Mako’s throat tensed and he gripped his fingers into Bolin’s shirt, his ring finger on his left hand slipping into a tattered hole, and for once, Mako didn’t know who was going to mend it.  
  
“Let’s go to bed,” Mako said, moving to stand and drag Bolin along with him.  
  
Bolin kept his dead weight on the floor, peering up at his brother. “But what about -”  
  
“I’ll tell you when we go to bed.”  
  
He looked ready to challenge this, but finally, he pushed Mako’s hands away with a weak, “ _I can do it_ ,” to stand on his own.  
  
Mako stayed still for a moment, looking down at him. If he shifted to the left, Bolin’s face was bathed in the weak moonlight, shining with tears and snot and grease. Crumbs from harsh Water Tribe breads were stuck to the skin around his mouth along with the grease from tigerseal meat. Mako tried to tug down his sleeves to his fingers, reaching up to brush it away while Bolin squirmed.  
  
“Mako, stop!”  
  
“You’re a mess! You’re not getting meat juice and crumbs on my pillows!”  
  
“They’re my pillows too!”  
  
 _“_ _Stop!”_  
  
Bolin pushed Mako away and the older boy stumbled back, shocked, as always, by the strength his little brother could display. He always forgot how strong he could be, despite being six and still a nonbender, the only thing he didn’t take after their mother.  
  
Before Mako could snap at him for shoving him away, Bolin’s eyes widened and he tilted his head to the side to squint in the dark.  
  
“Why do you have Daddy’s scarf?”  
  
Mako looked down, chin and mouth dipping beneath the thick fabric. He never forgot its presence there around his neck, but he was surprised at how easily he accepted it now. Usually he declined the scarf when his father wrapped it around him to ward off the cold, or to tie him to his brother to keep them from running off.  
  
“Let’s go to bed, Bo,” he said, stepping forward.  
  
Bolin watched him with his big, round eyes. Mako tugged one end of the scarf loose, the end that had trailed behind him like a cape during the run home. As the hem slipped past his fingers, he felt grit and dirt from the street. He brushed it away before wrapping it around Bolin’s neck, finding the other end, and tying them together into a loose knot.  
  
“You tied it wrong,” Bolin said instantly.  
  
Mako frowned and looked down at the small knot. “No I didn’t.”  
  
“Daddy’s knots are bigger,” Bolin said, fingers curling around the knot and tugging. “An’, an’ he showed me, if you pull at one end, it’ll -”  
  
“Dad taught me how to tie it,” Mako lied. “This is just like how he did it.”  
  
Mako held his breath as he watched Bolin’s grip on the knot slack. As he waited for his father to walk through the door and call him out on his lie, reprimand him for making it up. He waited and waited until his lungs ached for air and Bolin pouted at him.  
  
Breathing meant living and living meant his father was never going to walk through that door, so Mako tried to use all of his willpower to just stop.  
  
His lungs burned and he was weak, so the breath he gasped for filled up his chest and he hated himself for it.  
  
Tears started to sting behind his eyes when he looked down at Bolin, who had stayed surprisingly quiet throughout the whole ordeal. He found his brother’s hand and clasped it, the pair of them walking through the kitchen and into the dark of the living room.  
  
Their bedroom door was open, giving way to the pitch black of their shared room. There were no windows, no electric lights; Mako stepped over the threshold and dragged Bolin with him, hoping to disappear into the dark.  
  
“Hold some fire,” Bolin whispered, greasy fingers slipping against Mako’s.  
  
“No,” Mako said back, free hand extended, pawing at the air.  
  
Bolin whimpered. “Mako, I’m scared.”  
  
Just the word  _scared_  was usually enough to spark the warmth and light of flames in his hand, and as the drifting embers lifted from the dying fire in his gut, Mako’s throat spasmed and he jerked forward to retch.  
  
His stomach was empty. It had been since he emptied it earlier in the street. All that came out was a dying, aching sound and stomach acid burned the back of his throat.  
  
“Mako?” Bolin said.  
  
He breathed in a deep breath and clamped it down, sucking in the cool air and hoping it was enough to put out the fire in his stomach.  
  
His aching palm slapped against the cold metal of the bedframe and Mako exhaled, gripping onto it so as to not lose it in the dark. He pulled Bolin closer.  
  
“It’s ok, Bo,” Mako said. “Here’s the bed.”  
  
He heard, rather than felt or saw, Bolin scrambled up the side of the mattress to settle onto the bed. The scarf around his neck tugged, threatening to choke him, but Mako felt the uneasiness of standing on his weakened knees, of his exposed ankles free for evil spirits that lived under the bed to latch onto. He quickly followed after his brother.  
  
Bolin’s soft breathing was audible, mixing with his own, still heavy, breaths. Mako enjoyed the way his eyes could flicker over the room and only be met with darkness, going so far as to shutting his eyes to compare the black behind his lids to the black of the bedroom. Despite the feel of the blankets and mattress beneath his bent legs, despite the scarf looped around his neck and the tug of his little brother’s presence at the other end, it felt as if he no longer had a body. Everything floated to him now, be it sound or touch, like a cool breeze cutting through hot air.  
  
“Where’s Mommy and Daddy?” Bolin whispered.  
  
The tears started falling even though Mako didn’t feel as if he were crying. They slipped against his smooth cheeks, tracing down their previous paths, dripping off his chin and landing somewhere in the dark.  
  
Mako’s hands found Bolin. He guided his brother to lay down with him, heads falling against the cool surface of the mattress. He kicked the thin blankets down and over their legs, dragging them all the way up to their shoulders and tucking the hem to Bolin’s neck, just like their mother did every night.  
  
“Mom and Dad are -” he started, but the words were dammed in his throat, blocked by his tongue and his teeth and his lips. If he opened them his body would return.  
  
There would never be Mom and Dad no matter what he did.  
  
His hands started to heat and he couldn’t allow that to happen. He clawed desperately towards his brother, who whimpered when his fingernails caught his shirt, but Mako found Bolin’s sticky child’s hands and clasped them.  
  
 _You’re not allowed to firebend around Bolin when your father and myself aren’t home. Am I understood?_  
  
Mako nodded and tightly shut his eyes. Sweat collected in his hands, sliding the marred skin of his palms over the dirt and salt of Bolin’s, stinging with pain.  
  
Air ripped down his throat jaggedly as he breathed in.  
  
“Mom and Dad are gone.”  
  
“Where’d they go?” Bolin asked.  
  
When Mako opened his mouth to respond, all that came out was a mangled sob. To still it he pressed his open mouth against the mattress, feeling the sheets against his teeth and lips absorbing his hot tears to turn them cold.  
  
“Mako?” Bolin said, voice small.  
  
Mako inhaled sharply like Dad taught him, expanding his diaphragm and filling his stomach, trying to stave off the rolling aches that plagued him there. Nausea ebbed out from the center of his body just behind his navel to turn his bones to jelly and make his head pound with his pulse thumping against his temples.  
  
“Mom and Dad are dead,” Mako cried.  
  
“Wh-what?”  
  
“ _Mom and Dad are dead_ _,_ ” Mako yelled, digging his head into the mattress, trying to find an escape.  
  
“No,” Bolin said, fighting back. He dragged his hands from his brother’s, pulling up his skin as Mako’s fingernails clawed at it. “No, Mako, where’s Mommy and Daddy?”  
  
“They’re gone!”  
  
“That’s not funny!” Bolin shrieked.  
  
Mako opened his eyes and glared at the darkness where Bolin would be, feeling the mattress dip as his little brother sat up, dragging the scarf painfully against his neck.  
  
“I’m not being funny!” Mako shouted back.  
  
“Stop!”  
  
Bolin’s fists first collided with the mattress, bouncing back and he adjusted until they made contact with Mako’s side. Mako let out a shout at the sudden pain, harder than any punch his brother had even thrown at him. He sat up and through his tears grappled for Bolin in the dark. His little brother was wild, shrieking at the top of his lungs and thrashing his hands and feet, striking Mako in the head multiple times. Each hit a reminder that he still had a body, he still had to exist when all he wanted was to fizzle into the dark.  
  
“Bolin, stop!”  
  
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Bolin said, voice leaving his throat as if it didn’t belong to him anymore. Nothing so painful could come from a six year old.  
  
Mako felt a hand come down for his arm and he grabbed it, Bolin wailing at the pain of Mako’s fingers tight around his wrist, and he pushed forward to topple his little brother over.  
  
Bolin’s hysterics calmed into shaking, deep sobs, still peddling his legs and free arm to fight back. Mako moved to wrap his arms around Bolin, pressing down on top of him to keep him still.  
  
“I want Mommy,” Bolin begged, voice hoarse. “I want Daddy.”  
  
“Me too,” Mako said, voice cracking. The crying started again.  
  
Bolin’s arms were weak from their fighting, but he still managed to wrap them around Mako’s body, pressing his older brother closer to bury his face into his chest. Another reminder of living, but this one, gentle and frightened, made him hug back. Mako bent his head down to feel Bolin’s black, thick hair tickle his skin, absorbing the heat and tears from his sobs. In the pitch black of their room, as always, it was just him and Bolin.  
  
—-  
  
The next morning, Mako had to make sure.  
  
The bedroom door was slightly ajar. He peered inside, eyes traveling over the large, immaculately made bed. Pale yellow morning light cut into the room from the single window opposite the door, aged lace curtains lifting with the cold fall breeze. The air was crisp and sharp.  
  
The door hinges squealed when he pushed the door open, stepping into the room.  
  
The mattress groaned under his weight as he climbed atop it, settling into the dip where his father used to sleep. He didn’t dare touch the pillows that had been fluffed and smoothed under his mother’s hand. Mako folded his legs and leaned forward.  
  
Last night the world was fed to him with all of his senses overworked, but now they were dulled. He knew he was staring at the floral pattern of the quilt beneath him, eyes tracing over stems and curled-edge leaves, but his mind ran blank.   
  
He uncurled one hot, sweaty fist, extending his pale index finger to trace the edges of petals his eyes sought. He didn’t remember how long he did this, finger bumping along loose threads, traveling over stains -  _one from when he was sick with the flu, one from when Dad dropped food during a family picnic, one from when Bolin was scared and wet the bed during a storm_  - but slowly, he noticed a change.  
  
Pausing, he lifted his hands, watching his fingers uncurl and reveal the glistening, sweat lined creases, the brown and red blood running along the threadbare heels of his palms. Tiny rocks were embedded in some of the cuts and he wanted more than anything for them to sink into his skin, like his mother.  
  
 _You’re a part of the earth, Mako. You’re my son, not just a son of the Fire Nation. You are not what your element says you are._  
  
Just as curious as he had been the first time, Mako thought of the dark and of his father and watched sparks sputter in his hand.  
  
The memory and feeling was marred by a man with untamable fire that scorched his mother and father’s skin, and Mako lurched forward violently, feeling the kick of acid at the back of his throat. He fingers clenched into the quilt and he gagged, eyes frozen wide at the pain and clawing smoke that traveled up from his stomach and into his throat.  
  
A mixture of bile and saliva coated his tongue and threatened to run down the length of it until he snapped his mouth shut, swallowing the nastiness back down inside his gut where it belonged.  
  
He looked up, straight across from the bed to find his mother’s rickety vanity and dresser. He could just see his reflection in the oval mirror that was coated with small specks of the rice powder his mother adorned on her face, edge cutting off just over the bridge of his nose.  
  
Popping out from the right drawer was the tip of a white cloth glove.  
  
Mako stood and went to the vanity, tugging open the drawer and pulling out the set of white, immaculate gloves. His mother never wore this pair. She had taken them out once, folded them across her lap to show the boys.  
  
 _I wore these when I was married to your father._  
  
He tugged them on. The tips of the fingers were crumpled and they bunched around his wrists, but they hid his skin.  
  
He crawled back onto the bed.  
  
—-  
  
The gloves helped, but Mako still gripped his sides as he curled back up on the bed. The fibers caught against his scrapes. Unease bubbled in his stomach.  
  
 _Hate is a strong word. You do not hate, Mako._  
  
He was sure he hated himself. Any past use of the word, directed at his mother, or father, or brother in a fit of petulant anger was nothing compared to what he felt now. Hate was a strong, ugly word for an equally strong and ugly emotion.  
  
As the anger started to build, first towards himself, then towards the man who had started it all, the tears started to flow. His face pinched together with pain as his eyebrows knit and his nose snarled.  
  
He hated the man that had killed his parents. He hated him for taking them away, for ruining fire, for ruining  _life_  and  _lives_  and everything Mako thought he had known.  
  
 _Fire is life, Mako. You hold life in your hands._  
  
He hated his father for lying about fire, about life, for never telling him that he was going to die. He hated his mother for fighting so hard and failing, for giving birth to a firebending son when she could bend the earth. He hated them both for leaving him alone.  
  
His hatred for himself and the man burned bright like the white flickering tips of the flames his father could produce after serious concentration. But as much as he wanted to hate his parents, it was weakened with want.  
  
Mako shut his eyes and bit his bottom lip to the point of pain. He wanted his eyes to stay shut. He never wanted to wake up again and he didn’t know why.  
  
“Mako?”  
  
Mako choked out a sob at the sound of Bolin’s voice, but it was dry. He dug his face into the mattress.  
  
“Mako?”  
  
He grit his teeth and tightened his eyelids. Odd shapes and colors started to form behind them, shifting like sand into one another before his eyes.  
  
“ _Mako!_  Mommy, Daddy, Mako! Mako’s gone!”  
  
Bolin quickly turned his voice high and loud, hysteric and cracking into desperate shrieks. Just before Mako clamped his hands over his ears he heard Bolin start to sob. If he could block out the world by shutting his eyes, if he could dam his ears to keep from hearing, if he stopped eating, all that would be left would be  _feeling_. He convinced himself then that if he stayed completely still, he would stop existing.  
  
But he felt Bolin’s heavy footsteps vibrate through the thin floors, hurrying around the apartment as he searched for Mako. His name reached him muffled through his hands over his ears. His brother had called for their parents once and then never again.  
  
When the shouts stopped and the thumping footsteps ended, Mako knew Bolin was at the threshold of the bedroom door.  
  
“Mako?”  
  
He pushed his face into the quilt, away from Bolin at the door, digging his fingers into his ears harder. The sound of his breathing was magnified, louder than Bolin’s soft, timid voice, a constant reminder that he was still alive.  
  
The mattress dipped with Bolin’s weight as he struggled to climb onto the bed. He slowly wrapped his arms around Mako’s body and rested his chin on his older brother’s shoulder, all warm and soft and tender. Pudgy arms and round cheeks, all topped with a set of black curls, just like Mom.  
  
Mako relaxed his fingers. They drifted down from his ears to cup around his neck. He opened his eyes. He saw the curves of Bolin’s face out of the corner of his eye, his world bathed in partial shadow. Eyes tracing the curved edge of a flower petal on the quilt. He breathed in and out. Life pulled in and he pushed it out.  
  
“How did Mommy and Daddy die?”  
  
He wanted to shut his eyes. He wanted to curl back up into a ball and stop. But Bolin was right above him, holding him because Bolin needed to be held, and Dad wasn’t around anymore to calm them both. His eyes widened and his emotions drained from his body until there was nothing for him to do but answer.  
  
“A firebender attacked us.”  
  
Bolin nodded his head, burrowing it deeper into the cave he and Mako formed.  
  
“Why?”  
  
Mako swallowed thickly, still feeling the dull sting of stomach acid at the back of his throat. “I don’t know.”  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“The man got out of a car. He started yelling. Then he tried to set Daddy on fire. Mommy told me to run away.”  
  
“Daddy didn’t win the fight?”  
  
Mako shook his head. “No. Or Mom.”  
  
“Mommy fought?”  
  
“Mommy fought. Really hard.”  
  
Bolin considered this for a quiet moment. Mako had been just as surprised when he actually saw his mother sink low to the ground, prepared to strike. She never used her bending like their father, in fact, she hardly had reason to use it at all.   
  
“What are we going to do?” Bolin asked.  
  
Mako shrugged. “I don’t know.”  
  
“Should we tell Miss Una?”  
  
“No,” Mako shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“I don’t want to leave our house.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Bolin squeezed tighter.  
  
“Mako?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“I’m hungry.”  
  
Mako nodded. “Ok. Let’s get up.”  
  
He lead the way out of their parents’ bedroom, Bolin walking behind with one end of the scarf trailing on the ground, his small hands fisted into it.  
  
—-  
  
When the police officers arrived, they gazed over the apartment with their sharp eyes.  
  
At first, it had just been a man and a woman, officers Hye and Soon Yi. They asked to enter and Mako let them in;  _trust police officers and don’t talk to strangers, Mako._  
  
It took two false starts for Officer Soon Yi to inform them that their parents had been killed.  
  
Mako glared. “I know. I saw.”  
  
After that, all hell broke loose. More officers arrived.  
  
The woman in the black uniform with gold piping was the most frightening. Taped to the right side of her face was a white patch of gauze. Her eyes instantly latched onto the bubbling, rattling pot on the stove Mako had placed there, boiling rice for their breakfast. Brownish foam spilled out from the seams of the lid, making the tall purple flames hiss and flare.   
  
She shut it off.  
  
“Are these the victim’s children?” the injured woman asked.  
  
“Yes, Chief,” Officer Soon Yi said. “This one is a witness.”  
  
At this, the woman’s face softened for a single moment. It was masked quickly with her previous air of command.  
  
“Then we’ll question him down at the station while we search the apartment,” the Chief replied, eyes now doing a quick sweep of the room.  
  
“I already started the interrogation, Chief.”  
  
At this, the woman snapped her head sharply to gaze at Officer Soon Yi.  
  
“All questioning for minors occurs at the station under the watch of a Social Worker,” she spat. “You know this. Where’s Hye?”  
  
“…Questioning the second boy, Chief.”  
  
The Chief took it upon herself and a second officer to collect the brothers and bring them down to the station. She held Bolin’s wrist and looked at Mako expectantly from his seat at the kitchen table.  
  
“No,” he said.  
  
 _“_ _No?_ _”_  The Chief repeated.  
  
Mako nodded and held out his hand towards Bolin. Bolin instantly latched onto it, even as his other wrist was held awkwardly by the Chief.  
  
“This is our house,” he said.  
  
The Chief jutted out her chin. “We need to watch over you boys. Once we contact your relatives, you will be allowed to return to your home.”  
  
Mako frowned and tilted his head. “Who?”  
  
“Your relatives. Aunts, uncles, grandparents.”  
  
“We don’t have any.”  
  
The Chief shut her eyes tightly and held her breath before slowly exhaling.  
  
Mako and Bolin’s first ride in a car was in the cruiser that took them to the police station.  
  
—-  
  
Mako didn’t like the police station. He could tell Bolin didn’t either, because usually his little brother made a point to always run around some new place, running up to people and making friends. He had latched himself onto Mako’s side for the duration of their visit.  
  
It was too big. They had stepped into the lobby with its high cathedral ceilings, skinny windows shooting slants of harsh sunlight into the building, casting a harsh gleam against all the metal. Every sound was echoed and magnified by the cold grey walls until everything morphed into a rambling cacophony of whispers and steel footsteps and the whining protest of metalbent doors.   
  
The room the boys were taken to was small, but not any more comfortable. A kind man in civilian clothing sat on their side of a freezing, highly polished table while Mako had to answer questions.  
  
“Did you see the man?”  
  
He saw a silhouette outlined by the harsh headlights of a Satomobile.  
  
“Did he speak to your parents?”  
  
Mako remembered words and sounds but nothing specific.  
  
“How did the fight start? Did your father -”  
  
“My dad doesn’t start fights.”  
  
After the questions had ended - the man in civilian clothing patted them both on the back and said _you’re both such strong boys_  - they had been brought back to the lobby.  
  
Mako leaned against the railing of the wooden bench he was seated on, Bolin pressed against his side. He kept his eyes trained on the black hair of the Chief who sat before them at the front desk in the lobby; files and papers had to be moved from behind the desk to make room for the boys. She kept shuffling things around on the desk and barking out orders.  
  
Bolin buried his face into Mako’s shoulder, having tugged their father’s hat down over his eyes and ears to block out the world. They had grabbed it along with their coats when the police collected them from their house.  
  
 _The Chief looked down at the gloves on Mako’s hands._  
  
 _“Do you have a better pair?” she asked._  
  
 _Mako shook his head and she didn’t look at his hands again._  
  
An old man came up to the desk. He wasn’t terribly old, but his hair was grey, lighter at the temples and fading up darker like ashes. His work shirt was partially untucked and his suspenders did little to make his oversized trousers look good.  
  
“Any word on my son?” he asked.  
  
The Chief sharply lifted her head and slammed a file down onto the desk, gesturing out her arm to Mako and Bolin.  
  
The man’s eyes lifted and widened. Mako noticed that they were the same color as his father’s. Bolin shifted and lifted his head to look at the man, and the man’s eyes met Bolin’s green.  
  
“We were not informed that your son and his wife had children,” the Chief spat.  
  
“No. They’re not -”  
  
“-You do not take legal guardianship of your grandsons?”  
  
The man tore his eyes away from Bolin’s to glare at the Chief. “No.”  
  
“Then  _get out_ _,_ ” the Chief spat. “I will send officers to your home with any updates.”  
  
The Chief leaned over her desk tensed, inching forward as she watched the man walk away. Once he had disappeared through the front doors, she sighed and fell back into her chair, body slack for the first time.  
  
Mere minutes later, and she was screaming over the telephone at a woman that shared a last name with Mako and Bolin’s mother.  
  
“Mrs. Wen, these are your grandchildren -” the Chief cut off with a mangled noise, listening for one moment before slamming her fist against her desk, denting it. “You watch your mouth - if you do not stop your verbal harassment of me and my love of  _sulfur smelling, amber eyed, Fire Nation scum_  I’ll - hello? Hello?”  
  
With a grunt of frustration, she slammed the telephone onto the desk and sunk back into her chair. A moment passed where she stayed completely still before she sat up and turned around.  
  
Mako held Bolin tighter.  
  
“I’m so sorry, boys,” the Chief said with a sigh before picking up the phone again.  
  
—-  
  
The orphanage was on another side of the city neither of the boys had seen before, deep downtown near the harbor in the biggest Water Tribe burrow, nicknamed the Eastern Water Tribe. It looked similar to their home in Dragon Flats, though the brick tenement homes and short storefronts were lined on the gridded, planned streets of the city. The biggest difference was the astounding amount of blue that pervaded the area, dripping from tattered banners that seemed to be hung all year round due to their wear.   
  
The building itself was one of the rare remaining wooden structures in the city, outside shingles greyed by the sea air that rolled in from the east. Paint chipped from the siding and flaked to the ground.  
  
Due to the threat of being a fire hazard, there was no electricity in the building save for a single telephone in the main office. Everything else was lit with lanterns either sparked by fingers or matches. The rooms were heated with fire places that were haphazardly spaced in various rooms at random.  
  
The room Mako and Bolin had been sent to claim beds in did not have a fireplace.  
  
There were rows and rows of metal cots, and Mako was surprised to find that not all of them were in use. There were very few beds with anything on them, sheets rumbled by bodies that were too young to bother to fix them each morning. Even without every bed in use, the orphanage was still overcrowded and underfunded.  
  
Their first dinner was spooned to them on what looked like warped pie tins. The food itself was a slightly yellowed heaping of jook, thicker than what the boys were used to eating when made by their mother. There were no add-ins or condiments: just mushy rice cooked in weak chicken broth.  
  
They sat across from each other at a wooden bench with the other children.  
  
Bolin shoveled the food into his mouth, the first food they had seen that day, and after chewing his face suddenly fell.  
  
“What?” Mako asked, letting his full spoon drop back into his pan.  
  
His little brother’s mouth twitched, cheeks puffing, eyebrows tipping upwards. Bolin’s mouth dropped open with an aching sob, spilling jook down his chin and onto his shirt.  
  
“Bolin!” Mako hissed, looking up at the children surrounding them, who now stared.  
  
Bolin continued wailing, fat tears sliding down his cheeks.  
  
Mako leaned closer and noticed something wiggling in the jook that spilled from his brother’s mouth. He stood up, going to Bolin’s side and pulling a moving speck from Bolin’s shirt.  
  
A yellowed maggot with a shining black head squirmed in the white gloved palm of Mako’s hand. Looking closer, Mako saw maggots were everywhere in the food.  
  
His stomach twisted and Mako patted his brother’s back.  
  
“Just spit it out, Bo,” he said quietly.  
  
Bolin shuddered with tears. “W-where?”  
  
“On the floor, go ahead. No one will care.”  
  
He ducked his head under the table and the food spat from his mouth with a wet smack on the stone floor. When he lifted his head, he smeared the remaining jook off of his face with the back of his hand.  
  
“I don’t want to eat anymore,” Bolin whispered.  
  
Mako frowned and looked at Bolin’s pan. He scooped up a handful and it instantly seeped through his gloves, but he diligently picked out all of the maggots he could see.  
  
“If I take them out, will you eat it?”  
  
“Only if you do.”  
  
Mako hand fed himself and his brother, scraping the pan and flicking maggots away to the floor.  
  
After two days of living like this, the hunger got to Bolin. He climbed into Mako’s cot like he had every night since they had arrived, curling into his side and hugging him close, burying his face in the scarf Mako had knotted around their necks.  
  
“My tummy hurts,” Bolin whimpered, stifling his tears.  
  
Mako rubbed Bolin’s back. “I know, Bo.”  
  
“I miss Mommy and Daddy.”  
  
“Me too.”  
  
Bolin’s shaking slowed, and he lifted his head. His eyes were bright even in the dark, standing out against his dust and dirt covered skin.  
  
“Can I put on the necklace?”  
  
Mako sighed and dug his head into the thin pillow. “Again?”  
  
“It helps me sleep.”  
  
Bolin’s gaze was unrelenting. Unable to say no, Mako untangled himself from his brother, lifting the scarf from his neck. He crawled to the end of his cot to the small trunk he had been given to store his personal belongings. Flipping it open, he dug inside, under his father’s coat and his mother’s wedding dress until something caught against the fabric of his mother’s gloves. Scratching until he could feel it against his fingers, he gripped and lifted his hand to reveal the shining gold chain dangling from his fist. At the end was a simple rounded pendant with a square middle.  
  
Before Mako turned back, he leaned forward and shut the chest. He looked up and found a pair of muddy brown eyes staring at him from another bed.  
  
Mako glanced down at the necklace and cradled it close to his chest, bringing to to Bolin, who tugged it over his neck. After settling back down into bed, Bolin’s crying stopped.  
  
“Feel better?” Mako whispered.  
  
Bolin nodded, burying his face into his older brother’s chest.  
  
“Tuck it into your shirt,” Mako said. “So it doesn’t fall from your neck when you sleep, ok?”  
  
“Ok, Mako.”  
  
The rings and necklace had been lifted from their parents’ remains at the morgue. They were slightly burnt and tarnished, sections of the necklace chain melted together. At the crematorium, where the start of the funeral ceremonies had started, his mother’s pale hand slipped from under the white sheet draped over her body as she was carried forward.  
  
Her hand was laced with an open wound, torn skin and muscle a deep red-purple and scorched at the edges with black. The absence of the ring on her finger was noticed by the indent the band had left there as the stiffening of rigor mortis set in before it was removed. Her fingernails were crusted with dirt, as always, but without the decoration and with the scarring, it might as well have been a anyone’s hand.  
  
A few strangers stood at the outskirts of the small funeral service at the cemetery. Their urns were simple and unadorned, the best their father’s nearly empty bank account could afford. A social worker attended the funeral with them, holding their hands before walking back to their apartment to collect their things.  
  
***  
  
On the third night at the orphanage, Bolin requested the necklace again. When Mako bumped his gloved hand to the bottom of his trunk, his fingers never latched around a warped metal chain.  
  
He looked up, searching for muddy brown eyes. He stared at an empty bed.  
  
The next morning, Bolin’s eyes were ringed with sleep lines and puffy red from his tears, and Mako learned that children fled the orphanage often.  
  
“Where do they go?” he asked.  
  
The boy he had been speaking to gestured to the windows. “Outside.”  
  
For two more days Mako looked out the window. He saw children walking past, unaccompanied by adults, wearing clothing three sizes too big or too small. Their cheeks weren’t stained with tears. While they never looked happy, they didn’t look sad either. Their faces were emotionless and hardened, reminding him of the grim expressions of the officers at the police station.  
  
On occasion, their pockets were fat and bunching. Mako watched one bony hand dip inside and lift out a purpled stack of yuans banded with an orange tie. The child leaned against the building and licked her fingers, reveling in the feel of paper notes flicking past the pad of her thumb.  
  
He turned back and saw Bolin curled on the bed, whimpering for food and sleep and Mom and Dad.  
  
That night when Bolin never shut his eyes, Mako pulled them both out of bed.  
  
“What are you doing?” Bolin whispered as Mako opened his trunk.  
  
He sifted through the items, trying to grab as much as he could. “We’re running away.”  
  
“What?” Bolin asked, fearful.  
  
Mako fingered the silk of his mother’s wedding dress. He was glad that he wore her gloves so as to not mar the beautiful material with his ugly palms. It was in a traditional Earth Kingdom style, all long sleeves and train rippling like grass in the breeze when she walked. He let it slip from his hands to the bottom of the trunk.  
  
“We can’t stay here, Bo, we’ll starve.”  
  
“Where are we going to go?”  
  
Mako shrugged. “Wherever we want. Come help me.”  
  
Bolin landed on the floor with a thump, padding over to his brother. Together, they tore through the trunk, trying to convince themselves that everything was necessary to take with them.  
  
In the end, they were left with hats and their parents’ winter coats. There wasn’t much left for them to take.  
  
Bolin’s hand gripped onto the loose glove on Mako’s as his older brother led the way through the dark.


	3. Chapter 2: Gloomy Sunday

The man slid the single sheet of paper across the poorly lacquered desk, a pen placed on top of it. Mako could just make out the characters that read  “ _work, sign here, name, job_ ,” but most of the words were too long and too foreign for him to understand.   
  
This was always the worst part of any new job. He lifted the pen, the metal sides slipping against the soft, dulled fabric of his mother’s gloves. Leaning forward and resting his arms against the surface of the desk, he tucked his tongue against his upper lip in concentration, holding the pen in a white knuckled grip to keep it steady against his fingers. Painstakingly he wrote out “ _Mako_ _,_ ” just like his mother taught him when he was old enough to hold a pen.   
  
She had taught him initially with a brush and ink, until his father said it was useless for him to learn.  _Only the wealthy can afford the lessons and the ink anymore, Nuan, just give him a pen like everybody else._   
  
He sat back and observed the shaky lines of his name. It was strange to see it written out now - his handwriting used to be better. Back when he would attend school and scrawl his name across his papers and tests like it was something to be proud of.   
  
“Work starts tomorrow at 6:30,” the man said, reaching forward and taking the job contract and pen back. “Your punch card will be with the others. You will get paid at the end of the week.”   
  
Mako stayed in his seat, expecting something else to be said. The man had never properly looked him in the eye throughout the interview process, which amounted to, “ _are you fast? can you work a loom?_ ” so he patiently waited for him to say something.   
  
Instead his new employer had returned to his work for a moment before glancing upwards, recognizing the small child still seated before his desk, and with a glare he jerked his head towards the door.   
  
Embarrassed, Mako stood, thickly wrapped feet thumping on the ground with no sound, and he left the office.   
  
—-   
  
The Leather District was close to Huangse Town, the Fire Nation neighborhood that his father had often taken him to buy food. The Leather District was known for producing leather goods, but spattered in between the tall brick buildings that smelled of animal skin and chemicals were the fabric buildings.   
  
Mako had briefly been introduced to the series of long, high ceiling, rectangular rooms that clacked and snapped loudly out of sync, where fantastic metal looms weaved together long stretches of canvas and cotton. Pale winter light slanted in from the thin slit windows that edged along the top wall, highlighting the specks of rough cotton that twirled through the air like gnats. Children stood at each loom and worked, dipping their fingers into the tightly stretched rows of thread and standing atop the machinery to coax it into moving. Their faces were covered in grime and their clothing revealed their thin frames.   
  
And now Mako was one of them.   
  
It was usually easy to cut through the gridlocked streets. Mako climbed over two fences, finding it difficult due to the slick coating of ice that had collected on every surface, his gloved hands finding little purchase on the warped edges of wooden boards.   
  
He stopped in Huangse to pick through the trash behind Ryouta’s Restaurant. The trashcans smelled of sickly sweet sauces, heated spices stinging his nose as he edged closer to the gleaming silver cans. The dry, chill air of winter stood in stark contrast to the heat ebbing off the thick brick walls of the restaurant, making Mako’s stomach roll and saliva spread across his dry tongue and start to inch out the crusted corners of his mouth.   
  
There were two pig-chicken wings coated in partially gummed off batter, settled atop a messy pile of glass noodles speckled with green onion rounds that had turned soft and dark. Three porkbuns were mangled with a few teeth marks and rounded holes like bullet wounds, and Mako imagined a young child had been given them to eat by their parents, who fussed and kicked and pushed away the luxury of food until it was warped and sent to the alley cans.   
  
A discarded white box was hidden deep underneath the first layer of food, already moist and covered in grease stains Mako fished it out and used his hands to stuff the food inside.   
  
His mother’s gloves, once white, where now a mottled grey and brown, cooly coated in grease and wet specks of green onions. It was worth it. Food was worth everything.   
  
He pulled open his mother’s coat and held the food close to his chest, wrapping the flap of his coat over it protectively. He had learned to hide food after a grown woman knocked him down after toting off with the half eaten carcass of a pig-chicken he had found.    
  
After cutting across another street, Mako turned down a main road and meandered slowly to the busy center of Central City Station.   
  
There were always large crowds of people there, even in the winter months when the city frosted over. The Station pulled in working men and women boarding the trains to arrive at their jobs, to the weakened homeless littering among the benches and curbs. Most of the adults clung to the actual building of the station to huddle under the overhanging shelters, smoke cigarettes and pooling together warmth, reading newspapers. The opium addicts lined the walls of the Station as they laid on their sides, too fatigued by their drugs and the dead winter to move much. Their long pipes wavered as shaky hands struggled to hold them to their lips.   
  
The street kids, on the other hand, mingled around far away from the building. They formed clusters in the odd corners of the square, sharing tarps and blankets, hiding beneath them like they were hiding from monsters under the safety of the covers on their own beds.    
  
However, the prized spot at the Station was always Firelord Zuko’s burning statue.   
  
The flames that roared in the palm of his hand traveled up from deep beneath the ground, controlled by gas and sparks, the heat billowing up through the metal platform, up the brass figure, to eternally burn. Warmth ebbed out from the metal of the statue and onto the ground below it. The low fencing around the outside of the base provided a good barrier shelter for children to crowd against. Any snow that fell melted and never collected.   
  
Mako spotted the grey canvas tarp sandwiched between a trio of children trying to share a tattered cotton blanket, and the 13 year old girl that was masquerading as a boy with her choppy haircut and newsboy cap. She had herself buried under a thickly knit, woolen Water Tribe blanket, her closed eyelids the only thing visible beneath it.   
  
Mako stepped over the fence and lifted the grey tarp, hurriedly sliding under it and bumping against Bolin.   
  
“Mm-Mako?” Bolin mumbled, barely opening his eyes.   
  
Mako nodded, pulling out the food and cradling it in the cave of his torso and peaked legs. “I got that job, Bo. At the textile mill.”   
  
“When?”   
  
Mako pulled out a mangled dumpling and held it out to his brother. “Just now. Didn’t you notice I left this morning?”   
  
Bolin shook his head and his bony hands folded around the dumpling. “No. I slept.”   
  
“All day?”   
  
“I’m really tired,” Bolin whispered, his lips against the greasy dough, tongue licking to taste. His eyes were unfocused on a spot just above his knees. “I threw up.”   
  
“Where?”   
  
“Outside.”   
  
Mako bit into one of the pig-chicken wings. “What did you throw up?”   
  
“It was kind of yellow. With foam.”   
  
“Gross.”   
  
“I don’t want this,” Bolin said, handing the dumpling back.    
  
“It’ll make you feel better,” Mako lied, crunching down on cartilage and blackened bone. It bounced back against his teeth, unyielding to be chewed.   
  
Bolin dropped the dumpling and it landed on the ground between them. He curled up and turned his head away from his older brother. “I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”   
  
“You will if you don’t eat. Your tummy just wants food. You know it hurts after going for a long time. It’ll feel better with something in it.”   
  
He looked over and saw that Bolin’s eyes were shut again, his breathing slow and slightly wheezing through his open mouth. It had been that way since he caught a cold at the start of winter, when he would forcefully sniff back anything that threatened to leak from his nose, swallowing it down in a way that made Mako grimace. He knew food would make his brother feel better; it always did. It  usually  did, when the food wasn’t speckled with blue and grey mold.   
  
Plus, if Bolin ate, the food would be gone faster. He wouldn’t have to protect it for long against the hungry adults and children they were forcefully pressed against.   
  
“Bo,” Mako whispered, jerking his elbow into his brother’s side. Bolin moaned. “Bo, you have to eat, we’re moving today.”   
  
“Why?” Bolin asked, eyes still shut.   
  
Mako tossed the now clean pig-chicken bones to the ground, where it slid under the grey tarp. He picked up the dumpling Bolin had tossed earlier and started to free it of dirt. “Because my job is too far away, and I don’t want to leave you here.”   
  
“No, it’ll be cold.”   
  
Mako nudged the dumpling back into Bolin’s limp hands. “We’ll be ok. There are matches at the place where I’m going to work. We can have as many fires as we want.”   
  
Bolin opened his eyes, turning his head onto his left shoulder to look at Mako. His thick eyebrows knit together. “You’re lying.”   
  
“No I’m not!” Mako hissed. “I saw them, all of the adults smoke, I just need to take them -”   
  
“No,” Bolin shook his head, long black curls weighted with sweat and filth. “You never start fires anymore.”   
  
Mako held his brother’s gaze for a long moment, rough and hard, everything Bolin never was. He tipped his head back to his right shoulder and shut his eyes, dumpling slipping from his fingers to rest on his thin stomach.   
  
Not knowing what else to do, Mako sunk low into the ground and wrapped his father’s scarf around his face to hide his shame from the only person able to see it.   
  
—-   
  
He let Bolin sleep for an hour before waking him again, pulling the dumpling from his brother’s torso and holding it before his face.   
  
“If you eat the whole thing, we won’t move,” Mako bargained.   
  
Bolin contemplated this as sleep lifted from his eyes. He gently reached out and took the dumpling, taking a bite so small that it only cut through the outer layer of thick, gummy dough.   
  
Mako watched his younger brother slowly eat every bit of the dumpling with his sharp hawk eyes, knowing he could snap and toss it to the ground or hide the parts he didn’t want to eat in the pockets of his coat.   
  
When he finished, he looked up at his older brother with his eyes wide and pleading.   
  
“Can I have another?”   
  
Relieved, Mako handed him the whole box.   
  
As Bolin sucked long glass noodles into his mouth, he started talking about bending again.   
  
“I did it today,” Bolin said, the ends of noodles falling from his mouth and back into the box. “I made some pebbles fly.”   
  
Mako sighed and reached into the box, finding another dumpling and eating it. “Sure, Bo.”   
  
“I did it! You don’t believe me.”   
  
He shrugged. “You’re too sick to bend.”   
  
“Am not.”   
  
“Whatever.”   
  
“I’m an earthbender!” Bolin said, fingers in his mouth as he shoved more noodles in. “Like Mommy.”   
  
Mako sighed and stuffed the rest of his dumpling into his mouth to give him a reason to not reply.   
  
His little brother often brought up their parents, slipping them into normal conversation, acting as if they were still alive. Mako only invoked their memory as just that: with memories, stories from before, whispered to Bolin in the dark when he was sick and aching for sleep. To hear his little brother mention them in passing felt like an odd jolt of his heart, the pace picking up for one painful moment, throat clenching, before stilling as the sentence continued.   
  
—-   
  
Mako always woke up before the sun. It was a habit that started in their first week on the streets, when paranoia quickly set in to make rest nearly impossible. After a year had passed, he had gotten better, finding sleep when he could and taking sparse naps with wildly vivid dreams.    
  
He hated slipping out from under the warmth of the grey tarp, untangling himself from his little brother’s soft arms. He always halted just before leaving, gloved fingers fisted in the red of his father’s scarf draped around his neck, staring at Bolin as he curled up on the ground. It was a daily struggle of, “ _he might need it_ ,” and, “ _I need it too_ .”   
  
He left with the scarf, stepping out of their open shelter and into the grey frosted morning of the square.   
  
As he stumbled to get over the short fencing around the statue, his thickly wrapped foot collided with the leg of another child that had slipped from under a tattered blanket.   
  
The leg was stiff and did not move.   
  
Mako held his breath and looked up at the trio of children under the blanket.   
  
Two of them were asleep, the smoke of their breath billowing into the air like the dying fumes of a cigarette. The third was white with purple lips raw and chapped, hollow bird bones sticking out from under the blanket and short sleeved shirt. The snow that had fallen at some time during the night collected on the body, the spirits putting their child to rest under the very same cold that had killed them.   
  
This happened often, but that did not make it any easier to handle.   
  
Mako lifted his head and looked at the grey tarp where Bolin was still asleep. His eyes landed on the thirteen year old girl beside their shelter, brown eyes open and staring at him like an animal.   
  
Guilt flooded his gut as he turned and walked away, knowing full well that this girl saw him abandon the body of a child to allow the innocents beside it discover death for another countless time.   
  
He was done burying people. That was not going to be his job anymore.   
  
He walked silently to work, the same path he had taken the day before for his interview. He wore multiple socks on his feet and managed to stuff them into a pair of soft women’s slippers, his feet sweating and chilled at the same time. A few stringy ends of his long coat dragged on the ground from all the rips and tears, the sleeves rolled up to his wrists to keep his hands free.   
  
Other children were slowly making their way across the frozen streets to march into the factories in the Leather District. A parade of miniature adults with hard faces, outfits blackened but some with ties and loose suspenders on their bony shoulders, hands calloused with years of work. A cluster of young boys who had been on the night shift clung to the short steps into the textile mill, each smoking an expertly rolled cigarette, puffing the smoke into the air.   
  
The line to clock in was long. A few kids whispered to each other, holding small conversation that Mako listened in on.   
  
“My sister had her baby last night,” a girl two people ahead of him said, her dark brown hair pulled into intricate braids.   
  
The girl she had been speaking to was busy pulling at the loose threads on her sleeve. “How many has she had?”   
  
“Three. I’m just glad because she can go back to work now. I hate having to do mornings here and night shifts at the hat factory,” the girl yawned.   
  
“Your sister has had three babies?” another child, a short boy chimed in. “How old is she?”   
  
“Seventeen.”   
  
“You Water Tribe girls start young, huh?”   
  
The girl glared. “She’s been bleeding for years, she’s  plenty  old.”   
  
“Bleeding?” The boy repeated.   
  
The girl blinked, eyes wide. “You don’t know what bleeding is?”   
  
“Yeah I do!” The boy shouted back. “But people don’t do it for  years !”   
  
The two girls looked at each other and burst into a fit of giggles. Even as the boy continued to pester them, they never answered his questions. They said,  _he would understand when he got older._   
  
Mako had no idea what they were talking about. It sounded frightening. He shook the thought of people slowly bleeding for years, drop after drop slipping from their skin like the beads of a melting icicle, and clocked in with his small, fresh punch card.   
  
He trailed after a sparse line of other children to one of many loom rooms, where children were already at work. He walked past one black metal structure, watching a child climb up the sides like a spider, careful to avoid falling slats and turning gears as they quickly repaired a broken line of cotton string. It took all of twenty seconds for the child to complete the work and climb back down.   
  
He had been assigned to loom number 26. A boy younger than him already stood at the machine, prepping it.   
  
“‘Morning,” the boy said without looking up from the immaculate rows of strings he lined.   
  
Mako repeated the greeting and leaned over the side to survey the boy’s work, paying careful attention in case he had to repeat it. “Are we both working at this one?”   
  
“Yup. The name’s Nichi.”   
  
“Mako.”   
  
Nichi’s eyes darted over the fully prepped loom, and he pulled his hands away to straighten up. He was small, his head almost too big for his thin body. His skin was pale with cat-like grey eyes, black hair shorn down to just fuzz lining his scalp. He twitched rather than moved, like every movement from him was a mistake, but a mistake of habit Mako soon learned. Everything he did was of a meticulous, tight nature.   
  
His eyes flicked down to Mako’s hands and back up to his face. “You know I’m the runner, right?”   
  
Mako frowned and nodded. “You climb the loom.”   
  
“Yeah,” Nichi said, head bobbing sharply. “You’re taking those off when you work, right?”   
  
Mako looked down at his hands. The gloves were so stretched by now that they slid down to reveal his wrists, so pale in comparison to the skin on his face. What lay beneath them still haunted his dreams and he shook his head.   
  
“No. I never take them off.”   
  
“Why?”   
  
Mako glared at the floor. “Let’s just get to work.”   
  
Nichi didn’t instantly reply. Mako looked up at him with his glare in place.   
  
Nichi raised his eyebrows and shrugged, moving to the back of the loom. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”   
  
Mako properly understood Nichi’s warnings when he started the loom. The machinery moved quickly, heavy bars slipping and sliding over each other, carrying the strings to twist and weave. Just as often as they made yards and yards of rough cotton fabric, they made mistakes and dropped full lines, or bobbles needed to be refilled.   
  
It was hard work. He dipped his hands in to rewire threads, each time his fingers brushing away just in time from being broken.   
  
“You doing ok, Mako?” Nichi shouted from the top of the loom where the threads were stretched twelve feet high.   
  
Mako tried to regulate his breathing, pinching the tips of his fingers beneath the loose fingers of the gloves. “Yeah. Fine. How are you?”   
  
Nichi snorted with a laugh. “Yeah, I’m fine, don’t you worry about me.”   
  
“I wasn’t.”   
  
The gloves made the work difficult. He dropped a spool of thread once, rolling across the floor and trailing thread behind it, just as an overseer walked past.   
  
The overseer was a short, but blocky man. The wide line of his shoulders ran down his torso perfectly straight, bowing out slightly at his bulging legs. While a switch was in his left hand, he didn’t move to raise it as Mako rushed off to pick up the dropped thread.   
  
Instead the man waited for Mako to crouch down, his heart beating wildly in his chest as his fingers fumbled to latch around it, and the man’s flat palm struck the back of his head.   
  
Mako fell face forward to the ground.   
  
“Get back to work,” the man shouted over the sounds of the machinery.   
  
The rounded spool pressed against his chest, gasping in air as white stars bloomed before his eyes. Every pain he had started aching acutely all at once: the pounding in his skull, the hollow of his stomach, the moist and saturated skin of his hidden palms, the tips of his frozen toes.   
  
Mako stood in a daze.   
  
He picked up the spool and went back to work. The ache in his head never disappeared; it thumped dully all day long, ebbing out down the back of his neck, skipping the rest of his spine to rest at the base.   
  
_Earthbending is located where, Mako?_   
  
_The base of the spine, Mom. Why do I need to learn about earthbending?_   
  
_Because I’m an earthbender, and you’re my son._   
  
His mind felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton. The air was thick with cotton fibers, swirling in the pools of grey wash light that illuminated the otherwise dark room. It made breathing difficult, and every so often Mako could hear a chorus of hacking coughs from the children that had worked in the factory for a long time. Nichi was one of them. Every so often he would make a clawing sound at the back of his throat, rousing up saliva and mucus and the miniscule threads that clung there, to drop the mixture onto the floor with a loud  splat . There was sound and the dull aches of his body and Nichi’s spit for thirteen hours.   
  
His vision started to get hazy again when he dipped his hand into the loom at the wrong moment. One of the sliding boards pulled forward, a single spike gouging into the back of his left hand.   
  
“ _Dammit_ ,” Mako yelled, pulling back his hand and staring at the back of the glove. It gushed black blood.   
  
“You ok?” Nichi shouted from above.   
  
“I’m fine,” Mako snapped, right hand squeezing the left.   
  
“Woah, is that blood?”   
  
Nichi jumped down from the top of the loom and walked to Mako’s side. He inspected the injury for a second before jerkily lifting his head and staring at the sheets of fabric being produced by their loom.   
  
“Aw, hell, you got blood on it,” Nichi said.   
  
“Whatever, it’ll wash out,” Mako said, knowing full well it was a lie.   
  
“What are you doing?”   
  
Nichi froze for half a second before darting away, and Mako watched him return to his post at the top of the loom.   
  
The overseer returned, switch lifted in the air as he marched down the line to reach Mako. His face was red with anger and sweat, eyes bulging from the sockets as he stared at Mako’s hand, and off to the cotton sheets.   
  
“Out!” he screamed, switch lashing down on Mako’s neck, nearly knocking him to his feet. “Get out,  _now!_ ”   
  
“But what about my -” The switch came down again, but it was nothing Mako hadn’t felt before by now. “What about my pay?”   
  
“Docked to make up for damaged property,” the overseer spat, knocking the switch one last time against Mako’s ribcage. He felt his shriveled stomach and lungs rattle around and bound off of his bones. “Now get out before I call the police!”   
  
It was a hollow threat. The police would take one look inside this establishment and shut it down in a heartbeat if they were called.   
  
Mako turned and fled the mill.   
  
—-   
  
When he returned to the safety of the Firelord’s statue, the body of the child he had found that morning was gone, as were the two children that had been sleeping next to it. In their place were a boy and a girl, separated under different blankets, taking great care to not lean against each other as they struggled for the comforts of sleep.   
  
Mako paid them no mind, and he avoided the gaze of the thirteen year old girl to his left. He ducked under the grey tarp and found his baby brother curled on his side, eyes barely open, lifting a finger over and over and watching the ground.   
  
“I threw up again,” Bolin said.   
  
Mako leaned back against the warmth of the statue base, shutting his eyes and tipping his head up. He focused on his breathing the way his father had taught him.   
  
_Firebending comes from the breath. Breathing exercises and meditation will help you control your inner fire._   
  
“It was clear,” Bolin said, cutting through the flashing colors still bursting behind Mako’s eyelids. “Did you have fun at work?”   
  
Mako nodded. “Yeah. Loads.”   
  
“Are you tired?”   
  
“Yeah,” Mako said, sagging his shoulders. “I think I’m gonna sleep.”   
  
“Ok. Me too.”   
  
The pounding in his head seemed to melt away as he drifted off. Sleep never came easy but today, after the hit to the head and the beatings of the switch, it fell upon him naturally as it had when his mother and father tucked him in.   
  
—-   
  
The cold woke him.   
  
It was the worst freeze he had felt yet, and the winter solstice had only just started three weeks prior. Bolin was curled up with his back against his side, shivering in the dark under their tarp. The tarp, with its stiff, heavy fabric, was usually good at forming a large pocket of shelter with which to trap heat. Now, Mako could just see his cloudy breath in the dark.   
  
“M-Mako?”   
  
“Yeah, Bo?”   
  
“I’m cold.”   
  
Mako sighed and shifted to lie down, wrapping his arms tightly around his little brother’s sharp frame. “Me too.”   
  
“Please,” Bolin said, rolling over and burying his face into the scarf. “Please start a fire.”   
  
Mako sighed, his heart dropping into his stomach. “I can’t anymore. I told you. I can’t bend.”   
  
“Daddy could firebend. You can too.”   
  
“We’re not benders, Bolin.”   
  
“I’m an earthbender,” Bolin said, sniffling, high voice catching as his shivering turned to shaking sobs. “And you’re a firebender. Like Mom and Dad.”   
  
Mako shut his eyes and held his brother tighter, as if squeezing his weak, ropy muscles could fight off the imposing cold. He wished he could be like his father, fearless in the face of heat and light and smoke. Expelling a deep, even breath to kill flames, inhaling to give them life as he returned it to his lungs. Warmth and light in the dark.   
  
“Let’s get moving,” Mako said with one final squeeze before removing his arms. “It’ll warm us up, and we can look for a fire.”   
  
Bolin whined once before giving up and nodding   
  
They ducked out of their shelter, finding the square nearly deserted as night had fallen. A few dull embers of light sparked here and there in the bushes, signs of smokers of cigarettes or something more sinister burning there. A grouping of tall, leering men stood near the edge of the square, dressed in flashy red clothing with tattoos lining their calloused knuckles. Smoke billowed above the center of their circle. One pulled apart from the group to glance back at Mako and Bolin as they made their way across the square, revealing that the men were all trying to light thick cigars around a single flame burning in the palm of one man. They breathed their first drag as one.   
  
Mako bundled the tarp in his arms, knowing full well that the late hour did not guarantee that another child might take their chosen spot at the statue. Bolin trailed behind him slowly, breathing labored and sniffling.   
  
“Where are we going?” Bolin asked, voice too loud and cutting across the silence of night enough to make Mako jump.   
  
He shivered. “The alleyway next to the dress shop. There’s usually fires there.”   
  
On that night, there was none. There was a grouping of two teenagers, three adults, and two children just a few years younger than Bolin. They clung to the mouth of the alley as a few crowded around a bent trashcan, dead eyes staring down as if it were going to light any moment under their unwavering gaze. The rest fumbled their shaking, purple fingers around the garbage lining the walls, desperately searching for matches and more kindling.   
  
Mako just about turned and left to search for a better spot when Bolin’s hand clasped around the bare exposure of his wrist.   
  
His hand was cold. Fingers sharp like pointed icicles, no longer pudgy with their mother’s love and sticky with candies their father wasn’t supposed to feed him.    
  
Mako hadn’t felt his brother’s grasp on his skin in a year. All contact had been through the safety of his gloves, binding his ugly fingers and claws to never mar another human being with their touch. No chance of friction to start a spark and let wildfire spread.   
  
“Mako,  _please_ ,” Bolin begged, weak tears only reaching the corners of his eyes because clean water was impossible to find, and they were dehydrated, skin ashen and piss brown and now crying had been taken from them too.   
  
“Bo, I can’t,” Mako said.    
  
He hated himself. He hated himself and the way he made Bolin’s weak fingers dig into his skin, the way snot dripped down his red nose because he was sick. And because fire started to smoke up his throat.   
  
“I know you can.” Bolin said, fingers softly edging down into the gaping hole of the glove, pressing against the moist tissue of Mako’s palm. “I don’t want to be cold anymore. Be like Daddy.”   
  
“I…I’ll ruin it. I can’t, not with you, and all these people -”   
  
“I want to die warm,” Bolin said.   
  
Mako choked on the smoke pooling around his tonsils, a dry sob wracking his tense body, twisting his wrist to hold onto Bolin’s hand. A few people in the alley stared at the strange crying boys in the street, but as always, no one ever extended kindness to them. They had to do everything on their own.   
  
“Ok,” Mako said. “I’ll try.”   
  
He didn’t announce what he was about to do to the others in the alleyway. He walked to the trashcan and laced his fingers together, standing on the tips of his toes to see the piles of ruffled newspaper inside.   
  
He hadn’t taken off the gloves in a year. He hadn’t seen his hands in that long.   
  
Bolin stood by his side, shivering, holding the tarp in his arms.    
  
_Firebending is located where, Mako?_   
  
_The stomach._   
  
_And it’s controlled with?_   
  
_The breath._   
  
_So what do you have to do?_   
  
_Light a fire in my belly and keep breathing through the smoke._   
  
_That’s my boy._   
  
His breaths were deep and shallow as he twisted and tugged his locked fingers, gloves pulling off in unison. The sharp air hit his moist palms and seeped into the moisture born there, freezing it down to the bone. He tucked the gloves into a tight bundle in his left hand, shoving them into his deep coat pocket.   
  
He looked down.   
  
He’d seen a corpse’s hands many times before. The slip of his mother’s from under her white sheet as her body was carried into the incinerator fell into his mind often. Her glowing skin had turned translucent, every blue vein and stitch of muscle and line of sinew accounted for. The dirt was missing from under her fingernails as the bodies had been cleaned for burial. Until then he had never seen the nailbeds of her hands look like pearls before.    
  
His palms were lined like the squiggling ink of the rivers he had seen on a map of the Earth Kingdom back in school, all stretching out from a single point - a swamp in the middle of nowhere. The dead flesh where his fingers sprouted had turned mottled green and purple, puss eeking out from under the soft skin. Most of his fingernails were warped as they had grown to curve back into his fingertips, four of them blackened and one of them bent at an odd angle, stinging and wiggling as if it wished to be freed.   
  
On the back of his left hand was the open, breathing wound where blood trickled out as if it planned to bleed slowly for years, until all that was left was the husk of his damaged body.   
  
Fire clawed in his belly, begging for release. It would be wild and he wouldn’t be able to contain it, he knew.   
  
He reached up and placed his flat palms down into the lip of the trashcan.   
  
“What is he doing?”   
  
“Kid, there’s no fire in there yet.”   
  
He shut his eyes and felt Bolin bump against his side.   
  
The fire ripped a scorching trail up his stomach, through his lungs until they expanded to burst against his needled ribs, searing the joints in his shoulders and elbows and wrists together until they melted into fluid, bursting forth from his palms with a staggering amount of heat and light that Mako choked on the pain.   
  
“Are you trying to kill us -  _shit_ _,_  get his hands out!” one of the adult yelled.   
  
“Kid, stop, you’re setting yourself on fire!”   
  
“Mako, stop!”   
  
The adults pulled his hands out and Bolin clung to his waist, the pair of them crashing to the ground before the roaring trashcan fire.   
  
Mako gasped for air on his back, eyes wide and staring up at the illuminated fire escapes washed in orange and amber -  _his color_  - up into the purple night sky where stars cooly burned above him. His hands pulsed with fire and burns and the smell of ignited rotting flesh.   
  
It was not the stench of death in the street. He had nothing to vomit up even if he wanted to.   
  
“Here, kid, I’m a healer,” the oldest man in the ground said, kneeling by his side. Mako kept his eyes locked in place, never once seeing the face of the man beyond the blur of brown skin and white hair. “This’ll be cold. Hey, pipsqueak, move it.”   
  
Bolin whined. “He’s my -”   
  
“He stays,” Mako said, voice new.   
  
A sigh and a moment later, Mako’s hands were covered by soft palms and frozen water. A fresh pair of gloves to sew up his wounds and hide them from the world.   
  
The fingernail on his right middle finger was torn off and cast into the fire by the waterbender. Bolin placed his head in the hollow dip of Mako’s stomach as his hands were healed, perfectly cradled in the bends of his sharp rib cage and hip bones. Heat pooled out of his stomach like he had been dipped in a warm bath.   
  
“This is the best I can do,” the man said, drawing the water away. With it went the last of Mako’s cold and he stretched his fingers as heat flowed through them. “You’ll have some scars. Thanks for starting the fire, kid.”   
  
Mako said nothing, and he lifted his hands into his line of sight.   
  
They were rough and dry. Perfect kindling. He dragged his thumb over the fresh, bare skin where his fingernail had decorated his middle finger. A deep, raw scar bore into the back of his left hand. A few bumps of gravel were still embedded in the heels of his palms from a year ago, when he scraped his hands against the ground as he ran home to his brother. He liked the earth embedded into his skin.   
  
Bolin sat up, wobbling, eyes trained on his other brother. “Thank you, Mako.”   
  
Mako forced a smile, tearing his eyes away from his hands to look at his little brother. “No problem, Bo.”   
  
—-   
  
“How well can you firebend?”   
  
Mako’s eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean?”   
  
The large man before him, wearing a grease stained apron, rubbed his rounded fingers into his eyes. A sheen of sweat glinted off of his bald head, bright red like the skin of his face and arms.   
  
“You got any training?” the man asked with a heavy sigh.   
  
Mako shrugged. “I taught myself. But I’m good, I promise.”   
  
“Fine. You’re hired. You’ve got the morning shift from five to eight, everyday  except  Saturdays. Understood?”   
  
“Everyday except Saturdays, five to eight,” Mako repeated.   
  
“Good. Now get out of my hair.”   
  
Mako snorted and walked out of the small office, into the harsh light of the back kitchen behind Ryouta’s Restaurant. Men and women, a mix of firebenders and waterbenders, were stoking fires and twisting noodles above their heads to fulfill the orders of hungry customers at the front. The warmth of the kitchen was thick and tangible, sucked down into Mako’s throat like a tea.   
  
He stood at the back door that lead to the alleyway that he had stolen countless meals from, surveying his new place of work. Bursts of flame and the smells of food and splashes of spiced oils hitting blackened woks chimed in a helter skelter time like jazz.   
  
Two young girls kneeled before the special open grill where the full carcass of a pig roasted on a spit, palms extended where flames burst forth to crisp caramel skin and drip fat to sizzle in the flames.   
  
One of them lifted their head, amber eyes meeting Mako’s.   
  
He felt his face heat up and his hands clenched by his sides.   
  
She smiled.   
  
He was going to mention her to Bolin, but when he returned to the shelter they had found once more under their tarp, under the warmth of Firelord Zuko’s statue, he was still asleep. Bolin slept a lot.   
  
—-   
  
Her name was Rin. She worked the morning shift with Mako to burn the blackened ovens clean before the restaurant opened at noon to a flood of workers on their lunch break.   
  
She had dark brown skin, the darkest Mako had ever seen, her palms a fresh pink like the soft carnations his mother would buy during the spring solstice. Her hair was nearly the same shade as her skin, long and delicately braided with ornate clay beads painted dark blue. It was always pulled up behind her head to make sure the heat of their flames never singed it.   
  
“But my arms and eyebrows,” she laughed, rubbing her fingertips over the sparse hairs above her eyes. “They burn right off. You’ll probably get that way too. Here, feel.”   
  
She suddenly grabbed his arm in the middle of his work, the flames extinguishing, to run his palm over the bare skin on her forearm.   
  
“Smooth, right?” she asked with a laugh.   
  
Smooth, and  _burning_ , and he jerked his hand away as if he had dipped it into a flame with his heart beating madly against his chest.   
  
“Your face is really red,” she said with a bright smile. She had all of her teeth.    
  
Mako pouted and looked away - the last time he had stared at her, this strange girl with Water Tribe hair and amber eyes, she laughed at him - and he returned to work. “It’s hot. Of course I’m red.”   
  
She giggled. Mako decided he hated it when girls giggled. It meant nothing but trouble for him.   
  
They had themselves shoved into the mouth of the oven, burning away caked on food that had dripped and collected into black, charred messes. Their elbows and shoulders bumped together as they reached between the grills to the corners, flames the hottest they could make them, smoke masking their vision and filling their lungs.   
  
Mako was afraid to say he loved it. So he didn’t. He held back and told himself that just because this was the first job he had where he used his firebending, didn’t make it the best. The girl burning by his side made things  _worse_ , not  _better._   
  
“So,” Rin said, shoulder digging into his as she twisted to reach the top of the oven. “How old are you?”   
  
“Nine.”   
  
“I’m ten.”   
  
Mako hummed in response and focused on his work.   
  
“I’m half Water Tribe, you know.”   
  
The flames at his fingers stopped. He shifted until he faced her, noses only five inches apart. She looked back at him with her amber eyes slightly wide, as if holding her breath as she waited for his response.   
  
That explained the hair.   
  
“I’m half Earth Kingdom,” Mako said.    
  
“Really?”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“You look it.”   
  
“What do you mean I -”   
  
“- You’ve got dirt on you and everything.”   
  
Mako glared. “Not everybody from the Earth Kingdom is  _dirty_ _._ ”   
  
Rin shrugged and went back to work. Mako bit down on his tongue and did the same.   
  
It didn’t take long for her to speak again.   
  
“Some people in my family really hate me,” she said. Her voice echoed across the metal. “One of my cousins tried to break my hands to keep me from bending.”   
  
“What’d you do?”   
  
“I taught myself the breath of fire and burned ‘em.”   
  
Mako laughed, and it felt strange, but good. “I didn’t have anybody in my family to hate me.”   
  
He thought back to the police station, with the man with his father’s eyes, and the woman on the phone with his mother’s last name. He shook his head and they disappeared.   
  
“Are they all gone?”   
  
“Yes,” Mako said. “Except for my little brother.”   
  
Bolin was sleeping more and more, barely speaking, fingers too weak to wrap around food anymore. As far as Mako knew, he hadn’t eaten in a full day, and he hadn’t gone to the bathroom either.   
  
Rin hummed and snapped his attention away from his brother. “My family is really big. The Water Tribe side, anyway. There’s - there’s a lot of people that don’t like me.”   
  
“I like you.”   
  
She giggled and Mako felt embarrassment lick up the back of his neck and burn across his face.   
  
“No,” he struggled, edging back and focusing on the grime lining the grates above him. “No, that’s not - I didn’t mean - not  _like you like you_ _._ ”   
  
Her giggles were louder and he shut his eyes, blocking out her bright face, and all that existed was her laughter, the heat of her flames, and the smell of smoke.   
  
Her chapped, dry lips pressed against his forcefully, and his eyes popped open in shock.   
  
He had never been kissed before.   
  
It was over quickly and she pulled away, grinning like she had stolen something from him and held it teasingly just out of reach.   
  
“You’re cute,” she said, and returned to her work as if nothing had happened.   
  
Mako stared at her. Something in his gut told him that she was familiar in some way, like he had met her before, or was going to meet her. She had returned to him, like his firebending, but just like that first time it had been slightly wrong. He had made a mistake with his fire and burned his hands.   
  
He liked Rin. She was pretty and made his stomach twist into knots but a small voice in the back of his mind said that something was wrong.   
  
She gave him a stiff hug in the back of the alley when their shift was over before running off to the Eastern Water Tribe neighborhood, feet kicking up the snow that had gathered and was still falling across the city.   
  
—-   
  
Mako could flood his body with warmth as he walked to the Station, no longer needing to bind his feet with socks and newspaper to keep out the cold. The heat seeped through his slippers and cut through the piles of snow building up on the sidewalks. Each exhale of cloudy breath allowed him to watch as the snow falling before his face melted with his hot air, dropping to the ground as flecks of water.   
  
He moved with relaxed ease until a series of blocky police cruisers drove past him, all headed towards Central City Station.   
  
He froze and watched them. They moved at a slow pace, no sirens, but they were loaded with officers.    
  
Breaking into a run, he finished the block he had been walking down and cut through an alleyway, hoping his shortcut could outrun the brigade of cruisers. Each breath of frozen air traveled down his throat and ripped back up as a dense cloud, cutting through the white of breath and snow, eyes stinging as he struggled to keep his footing on the slick ground.   
  
He burst across the street and cars honked and squealed on their poorly structured breaks, but he saw the statue of Firelord Zuko proudly holding fire, protecting his little brother who laid at the base under their grey tarp.   
  
The cruisers were just pulling into the Station when he ripped the tarp off of Bolin, shaking him awake. Even as other children saw the police’s arrival, scrambling to run and shouting with one another, the commotion only stirred Bolin to whimper.   
  
“Bo, Bolin, wake up,” Mako begged, hand clasped all the way around Bolin’s thin upper arm. “We’ve gotta run.”   
  
Bolin let out a pained whine, and then Mako noticed his brother’s purple fingers and nose, the yellow crust gathered at the corners of his eyes and dappled in his black lashes, how his stringy, greased hair fell over his sweating forehead.   
  
One child let out a mangled scream as an officer gathered her in their arms, trying to gently place her into a cruiser, to bring to an orphanage.   
  
Mako dropped the tarp and lifted Bolin, tossing limp, sharp arms over his shoulders, coaxing his little brother onto his back.  
  
“C’mon, Bolin, I’m going to give you a piggyback ride,” Mako said. More kids were yelling as they were rounded up, tossing out curses far too ugly to come from a child’s mouth. “Hold onto the scarf, ok? Put your hands in Dad’s scarf and they’ll get warm, I promise.”   
  
“M’kay,” Bolin mumbled, obeying, his legs wrapped around Mako’s waist.   
  
It was enough to get them both moving, so Mako stood with one last look at the tarp, which had served them well for months now. An officer shouting a vague, h _ey, you!_  prompted him to start running and abandon it.   
  
Bolin was light. In all the times he had to carry his brother in the past, when Bolin’s feet would start to dry and crack and the pain would make every step hell, his little brother was heavy. His rounded form would mold against his back and give off heat, chin digging into Mako’s collarbone, and fat cheek pressed against Mako’s. Bolin was never  light , never  weak , always having some surprising amount of strength despite being the younger, nonbender brother.   
  
His brother was sick. Maybe dying. And all Mako could do was run away from the police and spit fire to carve paths through the snow on the sidewalks, his brother’s boney knees slicing through Mako’s sides and sparking against his own protruding ribs.   
  
He realized, as he ran down into the Packing District, where the buildings all turned blocky and uniform, that he would need to find another job.   
  
He thought of gold eyes and blue beads for a moment, embarrassment burning his face, and how charring food inside of a stove was probably the best job he had ever had. Then he sucked in frozen air to chill his lungs and willed it away.   
  
—-   
  
Mako had lit a fire behind a dumpster in a thin alleyway, sandwiched between two factory buildings; one clanked with the sounds of machinery being made while the other hummed with the sound of conveyor belts transporting goods down an assembly line. Bolin laid before the fire with his green eyes dull and glassy behind his knotted lashes, staring into the flickering light and heat. The purple of his nose and fingers slowly gave way to bright, shining red.   
  
Mako gathered up newspapers and the least soggy cardboard, piling it into something akin to a mattress. He attempted to tuck the corners of the newspaper like his mother had taught him with real sheets, but finding it unwilling, he gave up and patted the makeshift bed.   
  
“Here, come sleep on this.”   
  
Bolin’s eyes lifted. It was the only movement he seemed capable of on his own, so Mako lifted him and placed him on the cardboard, crumpling and stuffing newspapers all around his small frame.   
  
“I think we’re going to have to live here for a while,” Mako said, rubbing his palms together and feeling heat spread to his fingertips from his stomach. He placed his warm palms on Bolin’s ears. “So you’ll have to hide from anybody that might take you away when I’m gone, alright?”   
  
Bolin didn’t respond. He looked in Mako’s general direction, but he could have been staring at anything.   
  
“I bet you’re hungry. I’m hungry. I’m going to go for a walk and find something to eat, alright? And I bet I can find a bowl and melt some snow, and then we can drink some water. Does that sound good?”   
  
Bolin blinked. It was good enough.   
  
Mako stoked the fire once more, piling on more trash, before leaving.   
  
The Packing District, Mako soon found, was not the best place to live. It became even more obvious how this part of the city laid on a grid, everything uniform and even in a way that was unsettling. He was the only person walking the streets, save for a few sets of footprints marring the snow on the sidewalks. The tire tracks in the street indicated that at least five cars had driven through since the snow had fallen.   
  
It was oddly quiet. It was perfectly grey and white save for the reddish brown of brick siding. It didn’t feel like the city.   
  
Until Mako turned a corner and saw the stoney waters of Yue Bay, harbor docks jutting out, iron ships and cranes piled up to the land. A handful of men were directing large shipments of goods onto the boats, but they worked in relative silence. It was more like the city he knew.   
  
Behind the meager docks were buildings Mako was more accustomed to: those with flashier facades, ocher lights glowing above the front steps, people hanging about.   
  
However, the people hanging about were actually a pair of men with thick builds and blocky hands, arms crossed before their chests and leaning in front of a set of red double doors, a golden dragon’s face carved in the center.   
  
Mako stuck to the side of a building across the street and watched them for a moment.   
  
A child darted across the street, pockets bulging. His legs were nearly bare from the tattered state of his pants, one hand clutching onto a squashed cap to keep it from flying off of his head.   
  
He rushed up the steps and the two men stopped him before he could run inside.   
  
They exchanged a few words.   
  
The boy dipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a stack of purple yuans so thick, his fingers struggled to wrap around the sides. He waved it, the single bills flapping against each other, and Mako kept his eyes locked on them.   
  
The two men seemed to agree to something, and one pushed the door open, letting the little boy walk inside. Mako wondered what laid there beyond the doors.   
  
He stood and waited to see if his question would be answered, but the boy didn’t return after a long minute. Sighing, Mako pushed off from his hiding spot and kept walking, going behind the building where the boy had disappeared to find something to eat.   
  
The pickings were small, but Mako grabbed what he could. He managed to find some fruit that had not yet been completely eaten and rotted, a rack of ribs that still had some meat, and an odd assortment of vegetables. Though mostly he just found empty liquor bottles, which were always loud and difficult to maneuver around without making too much noise.   
  
He returned back to the alley where he had set up camp. By now he was accustomed to returning to Bolin only to find that his little brother had not moved once since he left. It worried him, but there was nothing he could do.   
  
He sat down next to his brother’s body, pulling the hidden food from his pockets and hands, setting it on the ground.   
  
“I couldn’t find a bowl,” Mako said, picking at a fuzzy blue spot on the skin of a kumquat. “You can drink from my hands again. Or maybe I can find some more dry newspaper and try to make a bowl with it. I did get some vegetables, and I know you don’t like celery, but -”   
  
“Mako.”   
  
“Hm?”   
  
He lifted his head and watched as Bolin stared at the ground, his palm flat and raised upwards. Bolin lifted his hand and along with it came a rock, hovering weakly a few inches off the ground before it shook, and fell with a dull clatter.   
  
Bolin shifted his head to look up at Mako. Mako’s wide eyes were still stuck on the rock, mouth open.   
  
“Told you,” Bolin rasped.   
  
Mako tore his eyes away to look at his brother. “What?”   
  
“Told you,” Bolin repeated with a shaky smile, before curling his hand back against his chest for warmth.   
  
He did. He told him countless times,  _Mako, I’m an earthbender_ _,_  but he never believed it. Bolin was too weak, too small, too old to be a bender now.    
  
_Just like Mom._   
  
Mako laughed. He laughed so hard and for so long that he didn’t even notice how his fingers sunk into the wet flesh of the fruit in his hand, pulling through the pain in his hollow stomach as it jerked with each tremor. Bolin had his eyes shut but he was smiling too, shoulders shaking for once with laughter, and not from the cold.   
  
He made his brother eat most of the food in celebration, and forced him to drink water held in folded newspapers, even as the ink lifted from the pages and made it taste strange. Because Bolin wasn’t able to laugh and talk like he usually did, Mako struggled to fill the silence, saying anything that popped into his mind in an attempt to watch his little brother’s face grow taut with smiles and pull out his dimples.   
  
He watched Bolin slowly fall asleep, stomach rounded, cheeks rosy with warmth. Mako ran his fingers through the stringy black curls that had now grown long enough to fall over green eyes, thinking of his mother and wondering if she would be proud.   
  
As sleep was a struggle to find, Mako watched the mouth of the alley for any trouble.   
  
He found none. Instead, he saw at least three children rush past, pockets stuffed with rectangular wads of money.   
  
He wanted that. Even when his stomach was nearly empty, each time he caught sight of the promise of purple wealth, it filled him up with fire and smoke.   
  
His fingers tangled in Bolin’s black hair, and he told himself he would get it.


	4. Chapter 3: Mannish Boy

On Tuesday evenings, after his feet were dry and cracked from his early shift running the rickshaw through the Financial District, after his pockets were stuffed and hollowed out, after the front porch lights were lit, Mako had friends.

The Triple Threat headquarters was located in the Leather District. A halo of ochre light spilled from under the eaves of the front door, where red paper lanterns were strung, golden dragons twisting atop the roof cutting into the purple night. It clashed violently with the uniform brick buildings where the acrid smells of tanning chemicals wafted in the air.

Two men were always standing guard outside the front doors, and they tugged them open for Mako instantly.

He let his eyes wander around the large room, staring up at the multiple tiers where men leaned over the railings with women, to other members sitting in the corners, stitching themselves together with tissues plugging their bloody noses. The lights were always dimmed, each reflective surface of pilfered silver watches and jade pendant necklaces and sapphire rings flashing gold with each shift of the wrist. A phonograph sang with a gritty smoker's voice near the pool table. It was slightly different now, dripping with garlands and flashy floral centerpieces, all for the spring solstice. Those members of the Earth Kingdom were swathed in silks of green and tan.

He fell into line before Arak, the man who always collected the numbers from the street kids running through town each Tuesday night. The kids in line pushed against one another, eager to get their pay, and to linger around headquarters before being kicked out. Mako let his thumb run over the smooth curve of paper slips in his pocket, ticking past his fingers, like a flip book toy Heng had shown him. Heng called it a  _kineograph_ , word bursting forth from his plump lips with a proud, scholarly air. Mako remembered a man and a woman dancing between the papers as they flipped past Heng's fingers. He imagined the numbers scrawled across his tickets would dance like a flip book movie, numbers racking higher and higher with larger sums of money.

"Hey, Mako, you gonna hand me the tickets or what?"

"Oh," he said, shaking his head and lifting the neat stack from his pocket, finding himself at the front of the line. "Sorry."

Arak's smile was meant to be warm and slight, but his wide mouth and thin lips offset his face to always give it a manic touch. His smile pressed the sides of his cheeks into long, sharp lines, like his brown leather skin had been folded hastily, tucked into a pocket and forgotten in the wash.

"You never seen the spring ceremonies before?" he asked, flipping through the tabs of paper.

Mako shook his head, letting his eyes wander around the Triple Threat headquarters. "No, I have. I'm half Earth Kingdom."

"You don't say," Arak said, licking his thumb to sort the papers into a box. "I never knew that. Hey, Heng, you know about little firebending  _Kun_  over here?"

Heng lifted his tan, bald head from his conversation with a pair of thin teenagers, shaking their skinny limbs clad in green like praying mantis. He narrowed his dark green eyes and clapped his thick hands to his waist. "Yeah, of course I do!"

" _Kun_ _?_ " Mako said. "My name's not -"

"- And don't call the kid that, Arak," Heng called.

Arak rolled his eyes. "Whatever. So, you want to stick around for a game of Liar's Dice?"

Liar's Dice was one of those adult games, the kind where the members of the Triad sat around a rickety table clouded in smoke, yuans and small shot glasses passed back and forth set in the same pace as the jazz they listened to while playing. Blue Lanterns, especially those as young as Mako, were never invited to play.

 _The_ _spring_ _festival_ _honors_ _children_ _,_ _Mako_.

The younger boy behind Mako, waiting to cash in his tickets, kicking him in the heel with swift precision. He was accustomed to this behavior now; most other Blue Lanterns he knew disliked him for being friendly with the real members. His grit his teeth to force away the shock of the kick before lazily rolling his shoulders, the same way he'd seen grown men stretch after stumbling into headquarters late at night.

"Ah, yeah," Mako said, sniffing. "Sure."

Arak's cackle was hollow and cold, and Mako knew he was being laughed at. Heated embarrassment brightened his ears, the sticky air in the room no longer familiar and comforting, but jarring and trying to swallow him whole.

Arak knocked his sharp knuckles against Mako's hair, linger for a second before Mako twisted out and grabbing the older man's wrist. Arak laughed harder and Mako scowled, walking off to find a plush couch corner to sit on until Heng would find him for the game.

* * *

 

Heng reminded Mako of his brother.

Heng barely resembled the eight year old with a mop of black curls Bolin had grown to be; but both were earthbenders with shining smiles, which was enough to remind Mako of dusty knuckles digging into his shoulder paired with childish giggles.

He stared at the rounded curves of Heng's broad, tanned back, revealing the beer bottle green lines of his tattoos beneath the sleeveless cut of his shirt. His muscles bulged under a thick layer of skin, shifting like slow rolls of dirt pushed around at construction sites. He turned his face to Mako, all pancaked and mangled from brawls, and gave him a wink before revealing the numbers on his dice.

The table of Triple Threats let out a groan, and Heng leaned forward with a chuckle, raking in ceramic disks that flickered like real coins in the humming lamplight strung above the table.

"You're picking us clean, Heng," Nobu said, shoving his dice back into his cup.

"He always does," Fu leaned forward, pushing up his sleeves and shuffling his meager pile of coins away. "Now, we were talking about something important, here, so quit bitching."

"It's because he's got that fucking good luck charm, isn't it?" Nobu frowned, pointing two fingers at Mako.

Mako glared at him, and Fu snapped his fingers to spark a flame that spat into Nobu's drink. With a yelp, watching the purple flames eat away at his whiskey, Nobu knocked the drink back in a flash.

"I was  _saying_ ," Fu said. "I was thinkin' about new break-in techniques. I hear the Agni Kai's are using explosive jelly, now."

"I don't want any unnecessary messes," Heng said. He shifted his winnings over to Mako, who was incharge of stacking the coins in the order of their worth. He had long since given up playing the game after he managed to double his five yuan pay, and Heng suggested he quit while he was ahead. Now he was content to help Heng win, and listen to the adults.

"There won't be," Fu said. "I can get us a barrel of black powder for cheap. See how it goes."

"That sounds like a lot of powder."

"It won't when we keep usin' it."

"Take it up with the big man," Heng said, rattling the dice in his cup. "Now, can I continue robbing you blind, or are we going to keep talking about work?"

The other men at the table laughed, and Heng grinned back, eyes nearly shutting with the force of his wide smile.

Mako was briefly reminded of his brother, a spike of guilt shooting through his chest, but he willed it away. Bolin was safe under the stone hut he had erected in an alleyway close to Little Wugou, most likely asleep with sticky rice still clinging to his mouth and dirty fingers that Mako had left him for dinner.

Another round of drinks was passed around the table, a small shot glass landing before Mako, and all thoughts of Bolin left his mind.

"What is it?" Mako asked, looking up at Heng.

Heng tapped the side of his nose. "Sweet Orchid wine. C'mon, little man, you can't tell me you've never had a sip before."

Mako lifted the glass and sniffed the rim, finding a heady, warm smell billow off of the dark purple liquid. It felt like a warm blanket had passed over his eyes, finishing up with a slightly bitter sting that clung to his nostrils.

"Maybe we should get him a full glass," Arak said, words broken by cackling laughter.

"How about you shut your mouth?" Heng spat back, but his tone was ignored by the other men who were still chuckling. He turned to Mako, placing his hand across his small shoulders. "My father always let me have a sip for luck. It's an Earth Kingdom tradition."

"Oh." Mako looked down into the small glass again. It seemed inoffensive enough.

"Go ahead, and that's all you're getting."

Mako smiled at Heng's warning tone, finding it comforting and familiar, and he tipped his head back to swallow the whole glass. It was disgustingly bitter, the sweet smell and hints of flower petals biting at his tongue like a lie. He heard the men at the table laughing, felt Heng's hand clap him on the back, and he screwed his eyes shut to force the liquid down.

Face twisted, he put the cup down on the table and shivered, violently rubbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth to brush away the clinging taste.

"Aw, you don't like it?" Heng asked, smiling, taking a delicate sip from his glass. Mako jerked his head back and forth, and Heng chuckled. "When you get older, you will."

Mako liked that promise, and looked up at the Heng, wiping his face clean with the back of his hand.

"Are you sure?" Mako asked.

Heng nodded, eyebrows drawing together and corners of his mouth tightening, and there was no arguing with his resolve. Mako hoped that someday, he could look as sturdy and unmoving.

"Sure I am. You've got dirt in your blood."

Mako's dry lips cracked with the force of his grin, turning his head down to stare at the table in wonder as the men turned back to their game, hiding his happiness under his father's scarf. He knew the men smiled, but not like how he did at that moment; real glee and joy was masked with hardened faces carved with scars. Men hid their smiles, while boys and Blue Lanterns bared their gap-toothed grins to the world. And Mako wanted to be a man.

He kept his hands under the table, flat palms pressing together and gliding the rough skin back and forth. The small, grey blue bumps embedded in the heels of his hands could still be felt, a small memento that there was substance, not just bloody flames deep under his skin.

* * *

 

Little Wugou was a family Earth Kingdom neighborhood, the type of place where working class couples settled into an apartment to have children above the family shop. Only the street lamps glowed with weak electrical light, dimming low like bright orange embers before surging every so often with mango yellow. Beyond the buzzing of the lamps, the neighborhood was silent with sleeping families hidden behind black glass windows.

It was nice to meander down the middle of the street in the near dark, hands fisted in pockets, sweaty palm gripping wilted yuan bills with less ferocity than normal. Mako's fingers were glued together with sticky pear juice, his mouth working around the last bite and cracking through brown seeds. He let his eyes linger over the familiar marigold garlands twisting around the iron lamps, green banners softly lifting with the slight breeze. He remembered holding his mother's hand and the dirt under her fingernails, the dust that now puffed from his clothes from Heng's hand at his back, and Bolin's black heels.

Mako called at the mouth of the alleyway they had made home, "Bolin, I'm back."

When no response came, Mako continued into the dark, letting his shoes scuff the ground to kick up rocks and discarded newspapers.

He found Bolin curled up before a jagged mass of rubble that had been their shelter, head ducked under his arms and whimpering.

Mako felt his chest collapse into his stomach, kicking up acid, and he rushed forward, gripping onto Bolin's shoulders and shaking him roughly. "Bolin, what's wrong, what happened? Are you ok?"

Bolin slowly lifted his head and Mako held his breath, preparing to see black eyes and split lips, or bloody cuts slashed along his brother's rounded cheeks that he had worked so hard to feed and fill. Instead, the only thing marring his brother's face were fat tears that soaked his skin, leaving clean white lines that cut through the grime dusting Bolin's cheeks.

"What happened?" Mako repeated, eyes locked on Bolin's.

"I-I wa-was playing," Bolin said. His face twitched, begging to let the tears take over again and collapse into sobs. "And the kids wanted food and they knocked down the house when I said no and I tried to make them leave but you were gone, you said you'd be back!"

Mako frowned and pulled Bolin away from the rocks, afraid he would start thrashing and hurt himself. "Who were you playing with?"

Bolin's sobs stilled, eyes flying open, and Mako knew he caught him.

"Do I know them?" Mako asked.

"N-no."

"Bolin. You're only allowed to play with kids I know, remember?" Mako said calmly, squeezing his brother's shoulders when he tried to look away. "So stuff like this doesn't happen."

"They were nice!" Bolin said, tears returning and paired with shrieks. "And - and you said you'd be back! Why didn't you come back?"

Mako thought back to Liar's Dice, to Heng and Nobu and Fu, to Orchid Wine and the pear he had been given as he walked out the door. How the guards stationed on the front steps ruffled his hair and wished him a happy solstice. He had been inside a building for hours, far longer than Bolin had in years, and trembling guilt shook Mako's crumbling foundation. Smoke burned his throat.

"I - Bolin, I'm sorry," Mako said, lifting a hand to smooth Bolin's long hair. It curled over his eyes and ears now, stringy with grease. "I didn't mean to leave you alone."

"I was lonely," Bolin whimpered. He unfolded his arms, grappling forward through blurry eyes to latch himself onto Mako.

Mako's chest heaved with a sigh, which Bolin pressed his face against. Mako held onto Bolin, rocking him back and forth, rubbing his hand over his little brother's back.

"What did they take?" Mako asked quietly.

"The rice," Bolin said.

Mako bit his lip and thought of the money he had in his pocket; how he had planned to use it to buy them both new shoes after the winter had eaten at them. Bolin shuddered and a small whine escaped his throat, vibrating into Mako's chest, and his decision was made on the spot.

"C'mon," Mako said, moving to stand and pull Bolin up. "Let's go to that dumpling stand for dinner."

Bolin's face broke into a smile so wide that his raw, red eyes nearly shut with the force, yellowed teeth shining in the dark.

* * *

 

Mako leaned against the bright red wheel of his assigned rickshaw, juggling with the coins and bills in his sweaty, raw fingers. He was having a good day, picking up more tips than usual due to the first warm day of spring, having to tuck them into the hidden pockets inside of his jacket to keep them safe. The sun warmed his head, heat trapped in the long, black hair coarse and tangled on his head, flooding down his back and pooling in his gut. Energy buzzed through his body even as his legs twitched with exhaustion from running.

A shadow fell across his hands and he looked up, squinting against the sun to spot two finely dressed men before him.

One dressed in mustard yellow gestured to the rickshaw with his white satin gloved hand. "How much will it cost for a ride to the Financial District?"

Mako tallied the distance in his head, thinking of shortcuts and longer distances, adding in the fact that the two men were clothed in silk rather than cotton. A silver chain was slung across the potbelly of the man dressed in lilac, who was tugging out a matching cigarette case. The numbers racked higher in Mako's head.

"No less than fifteen yuans," Mako said.

The man in mustard nodded, the pair of them moving to the rough, faded cushion seat. "Good. Take us to Baenamu Bank."

Mako pursed his lips to bite back a smile, folding his yuans into his pocket, grabbing his hat from the top of the wheel and shoving it onto his head. "Sure thing, sir."

Baenamu Bank was located on Hakka Boulevard, off of Lanhua Street, a long, thin road that stretched out from a small Earth Kingdom burrow. It was usually the quickest route into the Financial District, but it was currently under construction.

Mako stretched his hands, feeling his blisters ignite with pain and dry callouses fracture under the stress. He bent forward to rub his palms into the fine dust gathered along the curb of the road, staunching the leaking blisters to keep his grip on the rickshaw handles from slipping.

Shoulders burning and feet scraping against the ground as he struggled to push off and gain momentum, Mako pulled the two grown men behind him all the way to Lanhua Street, and feigned annoyance at the yellow barriers placed at the mouth of the road. Grinning from ear to ear as the officer on duty guiding traffic away pointed him down a side street, Mako counted each step he took as a new brass coin to add to his singing pockets.

He knew not to test his luck and turn down even more winding side streets, racking up the price and risking the chance of angering his customers, causing them to stalk off without paying. He passed his time working by watching mothers with their children bundled in their arms shop at the fresh fruit stands, at businessmen sitting at outdoor tables with their tea cups tipped upside down, leaning back in their chairs. It was a normal afternoon where he would nod at the familiar bums sifting from trashcans he had bartered with before, the rest of the world passing by on silk slippers and wheeled rickshaws.

He dropped the men off in front of Baenamu Bank, the total coming to seventeen yuans. He received a tip of two yuans, thanked the men for their generosity, and lifted his empty cart to find the next rickshaw stop on Shiying Avenue.

Two other boys, one slightly older and the other younger than Mako, were stationed at the stop. They leaned against their rickshaws and spoke to one another with their chins tucked to their chests, shoulders curved as they tried to fold in on themselves. Mako's shoulders dropped and he slapped the loose soles of his shoes against the pavement as his arrival. They nodded their heads to him in greeting.

"Hey, Mako," the older boy said. His pale skin was unevenly tinted with a shining pink burn, eyes colorless and pale like a creature suited for winter, with hollowed cheeks and oval face taught like a mask.

"Lawan," Mako nodded, and turned to the younger boy. "Yen. You guys on break?"

"Nah, we're done for the day," Yen said. He protected his dust brown skin with a broad hat that swung low over his muddy eyes, causing him to always tip his head back to speak. All Mako ever saw of him were the two black circles of his nostrils, and the peeling thin lips of his mouth. "You wanna go with us to Ryouta's?"

Mako shrugged. "Sure. It's on my way home."

"Where're you living now?" Lawan asked.

"Down in Little Wugou," he said.

Mako lined his rickshaw up with Lawan's, setting the handles down and looking at his palms. They were inflamed and weeping with pink blood, more flecks of glittering dust embedded in the raw flesh. He tenderly patted them across his shirt front, staining it with dappling stains, wincing slightly at the sting of cotton into wound.

The boys started walking down through the side streets, Yen bending the streets up to have them scale fences to avoid mangling their hands more than necessary.

Mako balanced on the rickety edge of a wooden fence, arms held out at his sides. He hated the feeling of freefall, of how his stomach rose up into his ribcage and dreaded the feel of it plummeting down into his pelvis. He drew in a deep breath, kicking off from the fence. The heel of his right shoe caught on a nail going down, ripping free from the threadbare canvas, and he landed with the blood that pooled in his feet splashing up his ankles, needles pushing into his bones.

"You sharin' the space in Little Wugou with anybody?" Yen asked.

Mako shuddered with the pain and bit the tip of his tongue, more angered at the ruined shoe than his injuries. "Nah. Just me and my brother," he grunted.

"You still with him, huh?" Lawan said.

"Yeah," Mako rolled his eyes. "Of course."

"I just don't get you," Lawan said, shaking his head, the crude pink dash of his mouth curving upwards. "It's not hard to leave 'em."

Mako pursed his lips together in a tight white line and decided to stay quiet.

In the alleyway next to Ryouta's Restaurant, the three boys managed to find some meat still clinging to a rack of pork ribs under a pile of old onions and peppers. They divvied up the ribs and sat against the cool trashcans, sucking away at cartilage and thick, gummy bone marrow.

After settling in among the bone littered alley, Lawan started digging into the heel of his right shoe, pulling out a dented cigarette case. "You want a cigarette?"

Mako wrinkled his nose, and his answer to decline was on the tip of his tongue before remembering his friends. How smoke permeated the tiers of the headquarters until it collected at the highest floor, hot and choking, light bleeding into the air like water into paper. The smoke would come from Heng's mouth on occasion.

He slowly nodded. "Yeah. Sure."

He watched Lawan gingerly pluck a mangled, hand twisted cigarette from his case, handing over the shortest to Yen and keeping the longest for himself. Mako was already accustomed to lighting cigarettes for others, finding it an easy way to pick up a few bronze coins when people struggled to find lighters and matches. Being at the other end of the cigarette for so long allowed him to learn how to smoke, how nostrils slightly flared to air to coax the fresh smoke in, puffing out like reeking factory smoke stacks.

He mimicked Lawan and Yen to light his own cigarette, preparing for a hacking cough like Yen had spat, only to find that the smoke dragging down his lungs felt familiar.

It tickled, and it felt like a rock had been placed on his chest, even when he blew the smoke from his mouth. He watched it turn to white wisps in the air, amazed that something so foreign felt so comforting.

* * *

 

With the money he had earned bulging in his pockets, Mako returned to Bolin after his meeting with Lawan and Yen with a five yuan bill waving between his fingers. He forced himself to not limp over the soleless shoe now clad on his right foot, ignoring the fact that he needed another.

He still saw Bolin's face streaked with clean white tears cutting through the grime on his cheeks every time he stared at his little brother. The guilt wrapped around his waist like Bolin's thick arms clinging to him at night, shivering in the cold, squeezing him until it was impossible to breathe.

Bolin stared at the purple flag in his brother's bloody hand and let his lips quirk into a hesitant smile. "Are we rich?"

Mako nodded. "We're rich."

"Can we - ?"

"- Yeah, c'mon. It'll take awhile to make it into Huangse Town, I want to be back before five."

Bolin scrambled to his feet and started clapping his hands free of the dirt he had been playing with. "Ok. I want to pick it out, though!"

"Yeah," Mako said with a smile, walking off at a slow pace so Bolin could keep at his side. "As long as it's under five yuans. And if it's the right shopkeeper." He reached up and roughly rubbed his knuckles into his hair.

"Mako!" Bolin said, wiggling away. "Your hands are dirty!"

"So are yours!"

"Mine aren't red!"

Mako darted his hand forward and tugged on Bolin's earlobe, Bolin whining and punching his older brother in the arm with a laugh. Mako laughed in relief, already feeling the stitches of his guilt being pulled out from his skin with a tickle.

They babbled as they walked down to Huangse Town. Bolin listened rapt with attention as Mako described all of his customers, the fresh flowers tucked into buttonholes and decorative hair pieces pulled out for spring. Mako spoke with his voice ringing in his throat, as if the riches he had seen belonged to him, and he was waving them like a flag to share with Bolin. Bolin told Mako what he did when he was off at work: playing with kids Mako knew were good, begging for change on a busy street corner.

Huangse Town was located on one of the older streets in the city, the thin roads more accustomed to ostrich-horse buggies rather than the rare Satomobile. The buildings were tall and thin, stretching into the sky so the afternoon shadows folded over the road, cloaking it in burnt orange darkness. Cracks of amber light dashed across the pavement from the bare cracks between the buildings.

Mako remembered his father taking him into Hibana Liquor's before, to purchase rice papers and cigars during the summer, along with small trick fireworks that snapped to the ground when thrown. The shop was stuffed with various general foods like dried noodles and packaged cookies claiming to be imported from the Fire Nation. Gold hookahs lined the back wall, shelves packed with sweet smelling tobacco that wafted out the door, mixing with the pungent spice aisle.

He had his hand on the door and glanced down at Bolin. The only green on his brother's body were his eyes - the rest was safe, neutral grey.

With a sigh, he tugged open the door, Bolin wandering inside with his head knocked back in wonder.

"What are you kids up to?" the shopkeeper asked.

He was a thin man, face sagging with translucent, greasy skin, sunspots and blue veins popping forward, his black mustache hanging long and limp before his mouth. His shoulders bowed in such a high arc that it was clear that he had spent most of his life leaning against the counter of the shop.

Mako cleared his throat and stepped forward. "We'd like to buy some -"

" _Mako_ _!_ " Bolin whispered loudly, knocking his elbow into Mako's ribs. "I wanna do it!"

Mako winced, not from the pain, but from the narrowing brown eyes belonging to the shopkeeper. "Right. Go ahead, Bolin."

Bolin stepped closer to the counter, keeping ample distance so he could still see the man behind it, chin and nose sticking high into the air. "We want to buy some incense, please!"

"What kind?" the shopkeeper asked.

"Ihai kind," Bolin said.

The shopkeeper's face fell with surprise before drawing back to skepticism. "Why do you need Ihai incense?"

"For our par-"

"- Any kind will do," Mako blurted. "We just need some incense."

Bolin frowned. "Mako, we need it for Mom and Dad."

"Oh," the shopkeeper said, standing from the counter. Mako grimaced. "Fine. Which brand?"

"It doesn't ma-"

"- White Lily, please!" Bolin said brightly.

The shopkeeper nodded, and turned around to the rows of incense lined behind him, kept safe behind a locked glass case along with lottery tickets and pre-rolled cigarettes. The long, cardstock packet of incense was decorated with a twisting white lily, held by a female spirit clad in a white robe, a red circle placed in the center of her forehead. Her small black eyes were soulful and pitying.

"That'll be seven fifty, boys," the shopkeeper said, sliding the packet to the lip of the counter.

The panic that had been ballooning into Mako's chest burst with a crack. "We only have five yuans to spend," he whispered sharply to his brother's ear.

The shopkeeper glared at him, but Bolin stepped forward, grinning, hand dipping into his inner coat pocket.

"It's ok, I have money!" Bolin said.

His dirty, chubby hand clutched two purple yuans, folded neatly as if they had come from a wallet. Mako watched in disbelief as the money was handed to the shopkeeper; Bolin's hands took the incense and the change with a business man's confident smile of bottomless pockets.

Bolin tucked the incense away into his jacket and Mako grabbed his wrist, tugging them both from the store.

Once outside, Mako knit his face together in an attempt to mimic his mother's disappointed pout, hand still wrapped around Bolin's wrist as he tried to squirm away.

"Where'd you get that money?" Mako asked.

"Mako, let go! We've gotta go see Mom and Dad!"

"Where'd you get that money?" he repeated. He paused and Bolin's strength weakened. "Did you steal it?"

Bolin pouted and shrugged, looking away. "S'not hard. Nobody pays any attention."

Mako shut his eyes and groaned, stomping his foot on the pavement. "Bo, I told you, you can't do that when I'm not around!"

"Nobody knows it's me!"

"It's not safe, what if something happened to you?"

Bolin's thick eyebrows simply puckered together harder, bottom lip revealing more bright red tissue as he jutted it forward. The staring contest lasted for only a moment before Mako rolled his eyes with a sigh, and Bolin sheepishly grinned with his victory.

"Just -," Mako started, turning and holding his hand out for Bolin. Bolin gingerly took it to keep the barely dried wounds from marring his hand. "Just, be safe, ok? If you're going to keep doing it."

"I will, Mako."

* * *

 

The walk to the cemetery brought them into the nicer parts of the city, where the streets were shaded with trees rather than unsound brick buildings that painfully stretched into the sky. Here, wrought iron fenced in small patches of gardens, new flowers creeping through the gaps to spill into the sidewalks. Those flowers that did were roughly snatched between Mako's bleeding palms to form a free, quick bouquet of mainly tight buds and pebbled, premature flowers. Bolin dawdled behind and took his time to reach between the metal gates for the perfect blooming carnation, tucking it into Mako's hand for safe keeping.

Mako wished he were able to do the same, to take the time and piece together a good bouquet, one his father could have purchased with real money for his mother. He wanted to take the time and laugh as soft petals tickled his thieving hands, but the stretching of the shadows only told him that they were wasting time, that he had a job to do by five that evening. He swallowed down his heart as it leapt into his throat, pushed forward as his knees shook, calling to Bolin and reminding himself that his mother always accepted his bouquets of weeds before with no complaints. He hoped she wouldn't mind another now.

The grave was small, both in height and in plot. The grey stone fronts were unpolished, names cut evenly into the faces with no character - not in the familiar scrawl of their father, or the classical style done by their mother. Soggy brown leaves clung to the corners, and Mako rushed to clear them free.

"We haven't been here in so long," Bolin said, pulling the incense from his pocket, looking at the rows and rows of graves. "I wish we could come more."

Mako bit his lip and nodded, tossing the leaves away. He remembered the bouquet and fluffed it together, tiny stems stabbing into his palms. He angled the petals towards their mother's urn, and sat back on his heels. Bolin silently fell into place beside him.

"I can pickpocket more," Bolin said, leaning closer to Mako.

He shook his head. "Nah, Bo, not here."

"What?"

"Let's not talk about it here," Mako said quietly, staring at the weak bouquet, at the cheap graves. "I don't think Mom and Dad would like it."

"Oh. Ok."

A moment of silence passed, the boys staring at the graves, plucking at the dead grass and wet ground.

"But we should come more," Bolin said. "We don't always have to bring the incense, right?"

"Oh," Mako said, turning to find the packet of incense bobbing up and down in Bolin's hands. He took the box and tugged out two sticks, setting them into the small holes above each urn, and pinching the tips between his fingers to light. The smoke rolled off of them in lazy, curling grey lines. It found peace as the sky claimed it as sunset orange, just a mark of lily wafting through the air. "I don't know. I think it makes them happy."

"Seeing us makes them happy."

Mako didn't reply. As he curled his fingers close to his chest, the rough, dry edges of his wounds caught on the threadbare fabric of his father's scarf.

The raw red of his hands looked angry, the black dirt embedded there pulsing as his skin tried to force the foreign rocks from his wounds. It was inflamed with unnatural heat that ebbed from his skin rather than his stomach. The soft fabric of the scarf was calm, deep like berry stains in fresh cotton shirts, cool and promising something sweeter than the vibrating red of his hands.

Bolin tried to hold his hand, but Mako tugged it free to loop the scarf around both of their necks, tucking his head onto Bolin's shoulder.

* * *

 

Mako pretended to dodge a punch, twisting low to pivot on his ankles, springing up seconds later with a volley of flames in his hand surging forward. As they fizzled out with the smell of blackened brick, he sent out a kick with flames licking ten feet up the wall. Grey and orange newspaper embers swirled around each cut of white knuckles through the air.

He knew someone stood at the back door to the Triple Threat's headquarters, watching him and smoking a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the embers cherry at the tip of the person's mouth, but they were content to watch Mako kill time before Heng returned to start another game of Liar's Dice.

"Who taught you that?"

Mako looked up to find that it was Nobu. His whiskey colored eyes stared at the slow curls of his cigarette smoke rather than Mako, slouching against the doorframe.

"I taught myself," Mako said. He sparked a flame in his palm and started tossing it back and forth between his hands.

Nobu raised a slender eyebrow. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"You're good," Nobu shrugged. "You just run numbers, right?"

"Yeah. So?"

"Nothin'. Just thinking; you're one of our fastest kids, right?"

"I'm the fastest."

Nobu snorted out a laugh, smoke forced through his nostrils. "Yeah, alright, kid. I think I've got a job offer for you, it you're interested."

Mako narrowed his eyes. "What's the pay?"

"Shit, you're on your way, ain't you?" Nobu laughed. "It's better than what you're making running numbers, that's for sure."

"What's the job?"

"We've got a... _shipment_  to pick up, down at the docks," Nobu said, smile spreading low and words slipping from his mouth like black oil slicks. "We know the cops've got us bugged, so we gotta get some kids to run messages back and forth to everybody. Easy work. You in?"

It sounded simple, even easier to understand than running numbers, and with a higher pay. Mako took his time to answer, tossing his flames back and forth through his hands, pace slowing as he thought of Bolin, of what could go wrong -

"Heng will be there," Nobu added. "If it makes you feel safer, or somethin'."

"Yeah. Ok. I'll do it."

Nobu's smile stretched in a jagged line across his face, fingers plucking the cigarette butt from his mouth to stab the embers dead on his tongue. Mako grimaced at the action, following the trash as Nobu flicked it from his fingers, hitting against the side of a trashcan and landing to the ground.

"Great. Now c'mon inside, I got something to show you." He turned and disappeared into the dark doorway to be swallowed by the sounds of smokey voices and clinking glasses. Mako extinguished his flames and followed after him.

Inside, the usual group of men that joined in the games of Liar's Dice sat around a small, cramped table. Heng had just arrived, a gunny sack half full puckered between his fist. Blackened dirt smudged across his face and shirt front, looking darker and rougher than Mako had ever seen before. When Heng lifted his head to find Mako entering the room with Nobu, his stony face fissured into a smile.

"Hey, kiddo, how's it goin'?"

"Good," Mako said, struggling to climb onto a chair. He placed his hands on the surface of the table, leaning forward and sitting high on his heels to reach. "What's that?"

Heng lifted the gunny sack and scowled, dropping it roughly to the table. "Black powder. Fu's idea."

"Oh," Mako said. He glanced across the faces of the table, to Arak and Nobu, who bit back tight smiles. "Where is Fu?"

The chair whined under the force of Heng's weight as he collapsed down. "Jail."

Men came and went with minor jail stints, usually lasting no longer than a single night. Mako relaxed, knowing that Fu would be back shortly. Some of the men even liked the time behind bars, as they were given meals and found time to relax and sleep, avoid paying rent on another night in a shitty, crowded apartment.

"Heng, you gonna use this?" Nobu asked, grabbing the gunny sack.

Heng shook his head, hand clapping down over his eyes and rubbing at his brow. "Nah. I don't want to see another speck of that shit again in my life."

"Good."

Nobu's chair squealed against the hardwood as he dragged his chair closer to Mako's, ripping open the mouth of the gunny sack, and digging into his pockets. He tugged out a squashed, black box with a roaring tiger on the front; the same brand of rolling papers Mako's father used to buy. He laid them out on the table, placing one in front of Mako, before pinching powder between his fingers.

"Here, kid, I'm going to teach you how to make fireworks."

* * *

 

"Hey, Bolin!"

The rice paper had grown sweaty and limp in Mako's tight fist, the gunny sack slapping against his side as he ran to the alleyway in Little Wugou. Bolin crawled out from the thin crack that served at the front door to their triangular shelter of rocks, pushing his long hair out of his eyes.

"Yeah?" Bolin asked, looking around in a daze. "Why're you back so early?"

Mako held out the sack with a triumphant smile. "I left early because I wanted to show you something. C'mon."

He turned and jogged to the mouth of the alleyway, kneeling down on the sidewalk, Bolin walking after him. The sun had nearly set, ebbs of dull yellow light still fading into the sky as the purple night set in, thick and opaque as streetlamps cut into the stars. A few people still mingled on the street, taking their time outside of small shops and dessert carts before returning to their homes for the night.

In the shadows, dull eyes turned bright with the springtime warmth of evening, fellow street children crouched among trashcans. They hid until the streets were clear of adults and threats, but they edged closer to spot the pair of brothers freely kneeling on the pavement.

Mako laid out the rice papers as flat as possible, pinching black powder into their centers.

"Mako? What're you doing?" Bolin asked.

"Just watch," Mako said, tucking his tongue against his lip, focusing on the precise twisting Nobu had taught him just moments earlier.

Bolin shook Mako's shoulder. "No, what's going on?"

Mako looked up and flashed his nervous brother a toothy grin, all apprehension leaving his face to be replaced with a dimpled smile.

The rolled black powder was complete, held between Mako's finger and thumb. Bolin stared at it while Mako kept his eyes locked on Bolin, making sure he would catch his little brother's reaction.

Pinching his fingers together, he felt the tip of the roll burn, and Mako tossed the firework into the air.

It exploded in a bright  _bang_ _!_ , popping and throwing white and yellow sparks above their heads, and Bolin screamed with surprise before it split into loud, high pitched laughter. It echoed across the street and called more hidden kids out of the alleys. Mako laughed, tossing more fireworks into the air to bloom with fizzling petals that Bolin stretched up to reach, dirty fingers palming softly at the purple sky.

* * *

 

The job running messages was easy. The difficult part was the sharp lumps slamming up into Mako's right foot through the remaining canvas lining his shoe. The left sole was coming undone, slapping against his foot as he darted across the wet asphalt to the next rendezvous point.

He barreled into the metal shipping crate carved out as a meeting point, three Triad members including Heng crowded around a peep hole punched through the side. His footsteps echoed sharp and loud against the walls and one of the men hissed for him to keep quiet.

"Sang says that you need to move up now," Mako panted.

" _What_ _?_ " Heng said, frowning. "We can't move now, we can't see a fucking thing and there's no firebenders with us."

Mako shrugged, leaning against the cool mouth of the crate. "He said now. And I'm a firebender."

"Nah, no kids," Heng said, standing up and rubbing his head.

"But, Heng -"

" _No_ ," he said, squaring his shoulders, his eyes just glinting white pinpoints in the dark. "Get back to Sang and tell him we aren't moving yet."

"But I can -"

" _Mako_. Get the hell out, we don't have time."

Mako stepped back, heart dropping into his stomach as he skipped the height of the lip and panicked into free fall, before his foot collided with the ground. The men curled together in the dark with just the faint outlines of their bowed shoulders stringing together, until it was impossible to tell where one body began and one ended. Their whispers threaded together to drown out Mako entirely.

Biting back his disappointment, Mako dug his feet into the ground, the rocks under his feet popping as he kicked off.

The air was thick with water, hazy fog streaking across the bay like it had been boiling and shooting off layers of steam. It rolled over onto the docks, Mako disrupting the uneven lines as he rushed past them, air turning cool against his burning face. He darted between the stacks of metal shipping crates in different patterns as Nobu had told him to, never passing the same track as he had before.

Sang wouldn't like Heng's answer, and Mako knew he would be yelled at again. He didn't like the way his friends no longer rubbed their calloused palms against his shaggy hair for completing a run.

He paused between a tight alley of crates, pressing his back against the frigid metal to catch his breath. In the shadows, he could shut his eyes and only feel the cool crate against his flat palms and neck, hear his breathing dry and rasping down his throat. He remembered Bolin's face just before he left for the night, his eyes wide with confusion because  _Mako_ _,_ _you_ _go_ _to_ _work_ _during_ _the_ _day_ _,_ _not_ _at_ _night_ _,_ _where_ _are_ _you_ _going_ _,_ _really_ _?_  Guilt spread out from his core until he swore he could feel himself sink into the metal at his back. He had no body in the pitch dark; just silence and guilt and his heart pounding away in his chest.

A crackle of earth ripped across the ground, vibrating up through the thin canvas of Mako's broken shoe. He snapped his eyes open and deep voices rang across the docks.

More thundering vibrations traveled across the ground, police sirens and roaring flames echoing across the crates until he couldn't tell where the voices were coming from. He stepped out from the crevasse, only to find that the weak dock lights had been cut, the world before him collapsing into black. He could only feel his fingers gripping the sharp lip of the crate he leaned against and the wet caress of fog slip over his eyelids.

Blooms of fire lit up pinpoints on the docks, light bleeding into the haze, each bloom of flame followed up with more shouts and footsteps.

It clicked in the back of his mind that he had to run, that when the cops showed up, that was always the plan. Without a second thought, he barrelled out of the alley and tried to remember where he had traveled before.

A gust of wind tore past him - a body, and he couldn't hear clinking metal or the soft shuffle of running shoes - so he took a sharp left away from it. His right heel came down hard on a sharp rock and he knew a blood blister would form there, and he bit his tongue to keep the pain from slowing him down.

His broken left sole folded under his foot, and with a squeal and a rip Mako tripped forward. His palms stretched out before him and flames erupted to push against the ground, to keep himself up, to keep running away because jail was  _not_  an option -

A heavy hand slammed against his bony shoulder, knocking him flat to the ground.

"Aw, fuck -"

"- What, you got one? Who is - ?"

"- It's just some kid!"

Mako's cheek was stained with wet grit against the ground as the frozen handcuffs were dragged across his back and locked tightly against his wrists.

* * *

 

Mako had been shoved in between the two metalbending police officers that had arrested him on the drive to the station. He had seen Nobu loaded into the back of the cruiser, shooting him a nasty glare as the officers gently lead him to the front seats. It was embarrassing how they spoke to him with flat, disinterested voices, as if they were reading comforting lines from a book. They had to pick him up from under the armpits to help him into the seat.

He let his locked hands rest between his legs during the ride, thighs pressed against the metal plates of their uniforms. The trip was silent save for the crackle of the police radio squared away in the dashboard.

He had never ridden in a car before.

When he was booked, he stood at the edge of a desk and watched an officer command thin metal strips across an I.D. board, fingers poised at the edge as he asked for the characters in his name. It took him a moment to remember the fuzzy shapes. Once complete, it was shoved into his hands and he had his first picture taken.

During the interrogation, with another officer and a woman dressed in civilian clothes (nice ones, Mako made a note of the embroidery and simple ring on her finger), they pulled out two manilla files. It took a moment, but Mako finally read the small, boxy characters of Bolin's name on the second one.

"It says here you have a brother that was also sent to the orphanage with you when you were eight," the woman asked slowly, as if he were stupid and unable to understand. "Do you know where your brother is?"

Mako's face scrunched together. Bolin was never going back to an orphanage unless he was there to sift maggots out of his food for him to eat. "No. I ditched him."

The woman's eyebrows tilted upwards with pity, and Mako hated her for it.

Two more officers guided him to a wooden bench before an iron door with characters written on the front that Mako couldn't read. They stared at him as they hesitated before it.

"You just, uh."

"Wait here."

"Right. Take a nap or something kid, you look beat."

Mako's lips curled up in a sneer and they shook their heads at him, muttering something, before stepping into the room.

He looked down at the bench and with a sigh, curled up onto his side, tucking his frigid cuffed hands under his father's scarf. He never had the luxury of sleeping on a bench before - spending a night in the city park without being arrested was close to impossible. How the officers didn't know the significance of this evaded him.

He shut his eyes and Bolin's grimey face crashed into his mind, twisted with wide eyes overflowing with tears because Mako had said he would come back and he was as good as a liar now.

_You_ _still_ _with_ _him_ _,_ _huh_ _?_

_Yeah_ _._ _Of_ _course_ _._

_I_ _just_ _don_ _'_ _t_ _get_ _you_ _._ _It_ _'_ _s_ _not_ _hard_ _to_ _leave_ _'_ _em_ _._

Siblings abandoned each other just as easily as their parents had, telling them to stay put like a good kid and never returning to the small space in the world that had carved out for their own. And now Bolin sat under a rocky shelter Mako had crudely taught him how to build, sleeping with sticky rice clinging to his hands and face, only to wake up in the morning alone.

Mako forced his sweaty, mangled palms into his eyes to staunch the heavy flow of tears leaking there, back bones digging into the hard bench with each uncontrollable shudder. He allowed himself to cry until the singing  _whoosh_  of the door slid open and the officers spilled out to collect him.

It was too late to drop him off on the doorstep of another crowded orphanage. He was escorted down to the bender cells, and Mako was unsurprised to find them stuffed with grown men and women stretching their arms between the bars to find more space. He caught the flashy red silk of the Agni Kais and the deep blues of the Red Monsoons littered among his friends that had been arrested with him. A few people yelled at the injustice of a child being tossed in with them, heckling the mask-faced officers who never cracked under their jeers.

When Mako found himself in a cell only to find Heng's broad frame curved into a corner with Nobu, Arak, and Fu, he charged to them.

They lifted their heads and Heng started a smile, but it fell quickly as Mako felt sparks fizzle in his palms and smoke push up against the roof of his mouth, forced out of his nostrils with a burn.

"Mako, what the hell are you doing here?" Arak asked.

"Did they interrogate you? Didya say anythin' stupid?"

Heng frowned. "Hey, kiddo, you can't bend in here or else -"

Mako swung his leg out so a raging curve of fire licked at their ankles until the heel of his foot collided with Nobu's calf. Deep yells twisted together from the other criminals and the Triad members whose expensive leather shoes he had scorched, and he looked down at the charring laces and stinking skin and he started yelling before he even realized it.

"I nearly got away! You shoes were  _fine_  and you still got caught! What the fuck is your problem?"

"Mako, calm down -" Heng said, flat palms barred to him in warning.

Mako punched flames at them quickly, catching the green silk sleeve of Heng's jacket. "What about Bolin? What am I supposed to do about -?"

"- Kid, shut the fuck up!"

A foot belted against the side of Mako's head and he felt a crack ring out as his skull hit the ground. The cell grew quiet with only a thousand whispers floating through the air, all about Mako, but none ever raising their voice to give him a name. Not even to call him  _kiddo_ , to latch a dusty hand under his arm to pull him up.

As shapes and violent colors bloomed across his eyelids, Mako realized he had no friends.

His elbows shook as he lifted his half-dead weight up from the ground, cloth soles finding little purchase on the floor. He pulled himself up to stand and felt a tickle travel fast down his cheek, and he pressed his hand up to his temple to draw it back and find hot, sticky blood ink his palm.

He managed to focus his eyes on Nobu long enough, swaying as he struggled to stand. Rocking his foot forward, he landed a flaming kick at Nobu's weak knee, his pants quickly catching fire.

Not bothering to watch Nobu beat the flames from his burning leg, Mako turned and walked back to the barred door. He sunk against the wall as people cleared space for him now, like the bouncers at headquarters tugging open doors for him, some knocking their knuckles against his shoulder like they knew his name. Like they were proud of him.

He pressed the end of his father's scarf against his cut temple and buried his face into the soft fabric for his own comfort, and shut his eyes to remember wide green ones begging him to come back home.


	5. Chapter 4: Me and the Devil Blues

The sky slipped from burnt orange and into deep, foggy mauve filtered with smog that burped into the air from exhaust pipes like broken, brassy jazz instruments. The city was morphed into an alleyway of long shadows that stretched across each lane of warm summer pavement. Heat was trapped between the cracks in bricks and tickled sweat from hairlines with ghostly hot fingertips.

Bolin’s hand was glimmering with muddy sweat caked into the soft lines of his palms, skin up to his shoulder tanned from sleeping in the sun.

“Can I wear it tonight?” he asked. 

Mako’s fingers curled into the scarf, eyes wide. “Why?”

“Dunno. Just felt like it,” Bolin said with a shrug, sticking his hands into his pockets and bending spikes of rock from the alley floor with a shuffle of his foot. “You used to give it to me more whenever I made a run.”

The scarf was still thick and the smell of smoke was stronger, no longer any hints of mud stuck to the darker stains. Only the tattered end turned stiff and black with oil smelled wrong now - a mistake Bolin made on his eleventh run, where it had slipped from his neck and landed in a rainbow black puddle.

Mako rubbed the fabric between his fingers. “I just...I didn’t think you needed it anymore. Since you’re so good at runs now and - I dunno, you’re more grown up.”

Bolin did not smile as he usually did whenever Mako made note of how much he had grown. Instead, he pursed his lips and stared hard at the ground, taught, wiry muscles in his arms flexing. His hair had grown so long that it was slicked back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, but one long, stubborn curl still dangled before his eyes.

He lifted his head to examine his brother, eyes staring at the flickering fingers bundled in the scarf. “Why? Do you need it?”

Mako stilled and he needed a lie, something believable, because Bolin still trusted him but there were more and more moments where Bolin would grow quiet and _stare_ at him. Bolin could see every charred burn of muscle and blackened stomach, scorched ribs and veins, all the way to Mako’s slick white spine.

A moment passed and the lie fell from Mako’s lips with ease.

“Yeah, I need it to cover up by face during jobs,” Mako said, hands drawing up the sides of the scarf to tighten over his mouth in demonstration. “So nobody can recognize me or nothin’.”

“Oh, yeah. Right,” Bolin said. His face rounded with a smile. “Where’d you go, Mako?”

Mako chuckled and shrugged, playing along. “I dunno who’s Mako, man, I’m just a reg’lar crook.” 

Bolin laughed and punched his brother in the arm, sparking a small scuffle where Mako managed to trap Bolin in a headlock, their dull laughter small against the pressing silence of night. Untangling themselves, Bolin managed to toss in one last, low jab to Mako’s thigh, before darting into the middle of the street.

“Bye, Mako!” He waved, skipping backwards to the sidewalk.

“Hey, watch where you’re going!” Mako shouted back, frozen until Bolin’s feet landed on the other side of the street. His shoulders sagged as he watched his little brother laughing under the weak glow of a street lamp.

“I’ll see you back at headquarters! Bye!”

Mako sighed and waved. “Bye! Be safe!” 

“I will!”

\--- 

The sick, syrupy stench of rotting garbage mixed with oil and festered in the thick air underground. Every movement scattered the wet humidity that hung in the air, slicking down hairlines and the crooks of elbows and knees to shimmer with sweat. Limp, discarded newspapers rode the humid air as subway cars swept them into life, billowing high on gusts to trail after the rattling cart.

The subway was dead at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night. Mako could tell a new shift at the power plant started on the hour, as the lights below surged white and hummed with energy. A few men were scattered about dressed in cheap suits, checking their watches every so often, shirts around their distended stomachs untucked with the recklessness of a night at the bar. Their cheeks were red and puffed with belches, rocking on their heels on the spotted, cracked tiles. The only other men in the subway were the homeless. 

There wasn’t much different between most men that dashed around up above in high rise buildings and those that slept on park benches. They all looked the same and drank themselves stupid night after night. They were nobodies.

Mako swung his legs back and forth over the edge of the platform, watching a leak of water hit the electric rails and spark, sending the nearby spiderrats away with frightened squeals. He waited in silence until he heard a set of sharp, echoing footsteps clicking behind him, and the subway sparked into life with the intrusion.

Sang looked awkward in his less flashy clothing. One hand was stuck deep in the pocket of his silk, candy red coat, the other twitching awkwardly by his side. His thumb ran around the inner junctions of his fingers to try and feel for the rings he usually wore. His black, short hair was parted on the left to mask the notch in his right ear - still immaculate as ever with his businessman style. He could try to look the part of a rich man, but everything was slightly off. 

“Hey, Mako,” Sang said. He fell back against the pillar just a few feet behind Mako, digging into his pants pockets for cigarettes. 

Mako just nodded, and turned back to the leak.

Seven drags on a cigarette later, and the dragon roar of the train rumbled through the city, flickering the waning lights. Mako stood and dusted off his clothes, leaning forward to catch the lights blink into focus around the black curve of the tunne.  It burst forth with sound and light and heat, like the bubbling lava hidden in caves under the Fire Nation; a monster from tales of Roku and spirits. With the air came the fresher smell of garbage to drag across Mako’s dirty face, and he shut his eyes to let it wash over him like a clean, seabreeze.

He climbed into the first car with Sang traveling behind him, covering their fare.

He sat down on one of the benches, leaning against the window and pressing his face close to the glass. His pale reflection stared back, while the flash of Sang’s red stood just behind him, gripping onto the leather straps above.

The train started up, dim lights flickering, and the reflection disappeared with it. He leaned forward and stared at the trick of the light from the station, watching as the tracks, the spiderrats, the garbage outside the window melted away until he stared down into a black abyss. The illusion happened with each subway stop as the faulty wiring in the cart stuttered.

Sang jabbed him in the arm at Dosim Station, and Mako followed him off of the train.

\--- 

Sang dismantled the street lamps on Lu Ten Avenue, leaving Mako to stand outside in the dark. He leaned against the shop front window, sweaty hair sticking to the plate glass, listening to the men inside ransack the place clean.

 Mako had the scarf drawn up over the bottom half of his face, air difficult to hold in his lungs due to the heat and fabric. He watched his palm open and close slowly, breathing life into a wickless candlestick flame, killing it with the curl of his fingers. Fire in the palm of his hand never spat out smoke and he wondered what fueled it. Fire could live outside of his body by eating, flaming tongues licking up cloth and wood and flesh. It worried him to think that something inside of him burned each time he lit a flame; was it his stomach, or his lungs turning black and charred?

The bell on the shop door rang and Mako looked up to find Nobu there, eyes flickering around the street. "All clear?"

"Yeah," Mako said. Nobody had passed the street since their arrival.

"Come in," Nobu said. "We got something to teach you."

Mako walked into the store under Nobu's arm, hands in his pockets. The main floor of the shop was cut into a wide series of mazes, divided with rectangular glass jewelry displays. The pale light from outside cast long patches of grey into the dark, stretching out the shadows until the mass of men in the back of the room became a pitch black monster of many limbs, waving Mako over. 

Carved into the back wall was a safe. A chair was already placed under it for Mako to stand on, while Sang stood closest, fingers tapping against the metal. 

"Alright, you gotta open the safe while we pick the place, got it?" Sang said, pushing off from the wall.

"I've never -"

"- But you know how to do it," Sang said, "You used to work with Heng, right?"

Mako frowned and nodded.

"Well, there you go. None of us can do it, so, you gotta." He slapped him on the back as he walked away.

"Quick and clean, Mako." 

Mako glared and climbed onto the chair as the rest of the men drifted around the room to station themselves at various displays, picking locks to dip their rough hands into glass treasure chests of jewels and gold. Behind him he could hear the soft scrapes of glass sliding away, the jingling of necklace chains knotting together and being stuffed into bags.

He leaned forward, the cold metal of the safe refreshing on his ear. He wrapped his hand in his scarf before pinching the dial and slowly turning. Heng never outright taught him how to crack a safe; just snippets of information here and there, _go through dates first, wear something over your hand for fingerprints, look at the people before you hit a place up_. 

Thankfully, Mako had been in charge of scoping out the store before the plans to raid it were made. He had found a brochure in the back trashcans telling the history of the store, how had it passed down from a long line of Fire Nation jewelers, and he had a handful of dates memorized.

 _On May 10th, the same day as the day of Black Sun, Wei Shen of the capital married Neng Xui, the first woman to ever wear a golden, yellow diamond headpiece at a marriage ceremony, sparking a new tradition in Fire Nation marriages_.

He opened the safe on the first try. 

"Good work," Sang said, shoving a burlap sack stuffed with sharp jewelry into Mako's hands. He stuck his fingers into the safe and started pulling out manilla folders, ledgers, and finally, brown paper bags blocky with gold and silver bars.

Mako stepped off of the chair, and turned to watch the men crowd around the safe. He could see their ducked faces shadowy and quiet, fingers rustling against the soft packages with the whispers of greed billowing from their mouths.

He walked away with his arms still laden with the sack and out of the store. He could have been more careful about being seen, leaning against the shop window again, opening the sack and pulling out knots of gold chains. Instead he held the chains up high, watching the dull light spark off of the metals. A pleasant burn flared at the base of his lungs as the light climbed up the chain links like a ladder, until the shine turned brilliant white as the street lamps turned on.

He dropped the chains into the bag and tore inside, fist banging against the glass door.

"Shit, shit, everybody out!"

"Get the stuff, don't forget anything, don't -"

"- Don't leave stuff behind!"

"Close the safe, clean it up!"

Mako rushed inside, following the first couple of men to duck out of the back door, listening to the rest of the them hang behind and the crack of shattered glass spill across the floor. 

"Look at what you did!"

The man in front of Mako froze before crossing the threshold into the back alley, turning his head around. "Should we -?" 

Mako rammed his shoulder into the man's legs, shoving him forward. The two of them stumbled into the alleyway behind Sang, while the back door swung shut. Sang made a racket tearing through the alleyway, shined black shoes crunching over metal cans and ripped newspaper. 

The man Mako had shoved turned out to be younger than the others. They locked eyes for a moment, the man squinting in the dark at a boy that just managed to reach his waist; Mako glared at an adult who should know better, heavy breaths flooding the hot insides of his scarf, more damp sweat collecting on his neck. 

Mako left first, jogging after Sang to make it back to headquarters.

\---

Mako watched the bills flip through Arak's fingers, and he knew he was counting slow just to tick him off. He could tell by the sharp laugh line cut into the corner of his mouth that dug deeper and deeper with each added yuan to the stack on the table.

"Aaaand…fifty."

He swiped the money off the table before Arak could waste more of his time, and tapped it against his palm to line up the bills.

"Aw, Mako, don't be like that."

He shrugged and turned away, saluting with two fingers to say goodbye. 

"Fine, be a little shit. Your brother's in the main room, by the way."

Mako sighed. "Thanks, Arak."

He stepped out of the room and onto the balcony. It wrapped around the second floor level with a red railing decorated with golden, spitting dragons. Mako latched his fingers onto one, pressing his head against the cool gold, looking down at the first floor.

Flashing beads of dull light twinkled below him like the stars cutting through the smoggy sky; as if they had fallen to earth and settled across the necklaces and rings of criminals. Mako knew stories of the spirits guiding the souls of heroes into the heavens, to hang for eternity in constellation graves, the highest honor a human could have. What did the spirits intend for the stars that flashed below, in the dark underbelly of a Triad place of business stuffed, with heat and stolen jewels?

Nothing good, he guessed.

Against all the twinkling stars Mako found one grubby spot that had been untampered by the spirits. Bolin, dressed in a large grey coat, was curled up against the arm of a leather sofa. At the other end, long limbs stretching lazy across the divide, sat a man with a woman spread across his lap.

Mako bit the tip of his tongue, rolling it against his teeth. His brother was asleep.

 He walked down the stairs to the first floor, pivoting around bare legs in short skirts and knocking his knuckles into the backs of knees draped in tailored slacks. He elbowed his way through the clusters of people that always appeared after a good raid, when there was money to buy girls and necklaces to sling across their pretty necks. Mako stepped and scuffed up shoes, hearing moans of annoyance trail after him.

The man and the woman on the other end of the couch had their faces pressed close together, her head turned away so his lips could brush hot words into her ear. The back of his fingers lazily ran over the woman's bare legs. She laughed dark and breathily, foot lifting in the air and nudging Bolin's leg.

Mako shook Bolin awake, his brother's eyes flickering open.

"Hi, Mako," Bolin said with a smile.

"Hey. Did you have a good night?" 

Bolin nodded and sat up, his rounded cheek sticking with sweat to the leather armrest. Red, criss-crossing lines marked his face and he sleepily rubbed them away. He glanced at the man and woman at his side and his eyes stayed there.

"Shui said that we can stay in an apartment tonight since it's gonna rain," Mako said, trying to snap Bolin's attention back. "Do you have your money?" 

"Oh, yeah." 

Bolin started patting his hands over his jacket, feeling for money, his eyes still darting over to the couple next to him. His hand dipped into the inside of his jacket, digging into a hidden pocket, and pulling out a thin stack of yuans.

Mako took it while Bolin slipped off the couch, the pair of them walking to find Shui while Mako counted.

"This is only twelve yuans, Bo," Mako said. "There's three missing." 

"I bought some chuanr with Yen and Iluq -"

"- So, you've had dinner already?"

Bolin's eyes widened slightly before nodding. "Yeah. I guess so."

"Alright," Mako said, folding the money and tucking it into his coat.

"It's ok, right -"

" - Yeah, it's fine. C'mon, we're going to Shui's place." 

"What are you going to eat?"

"I'll eat at Shui's."

 Shui was waiting for them both at the entrance with a woman. She often sat around headquarters, but she wasn't like the other women who melted into the room, just flashing satins and glassy eyes bleeding out of shadows. Her name was Chou, and she was most often found leaning over pool tables and appraising jewels rounded up after a rare heist. 

Her arm was draped over Shui's shoulders, while he cupped his hands before his mouth to light a cigarette. He was a tall, thin man, elbows and knees poking out of his cheap suits like snapped matchsticks. Chou was all contrast to him with rounded thighs and a short build.

"You boys know Chou?" Shui asked.

Her lips puckered with her smile. "Oh, I know Mako'n'Bolin. Bolin's my little boyfriend, right, honey?"

Bolin's cheeks reddened and he nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

"What a little gentleman."

"What do we have to do to stay in the apartment?" Mako asked.

They started walking out of headquarters, hitting the muggy night air like sinking into a warm, stagnant pool of water. A drizzle of rain had already started blurring the lines on the street. Shui burned out of the dark with the reddened eye of his cigarette waving back and forth as he looked up and down the road. 

"Cook us dinner."

\---

Most Triad apartments were stuffed with people. More than just members and their girls, but many strangers at once pooling their money together to get off the streets, even if it meant cramping themselves into a one bedroom apartment. 

There were at least twenty people in the split living room-kitchen area, scattered over a couch with no cushions and two wooden chairs, the rest spilling onto the floor. Others sat on the kitchen counters, leaning over the sink to ash their cigarettes. One day the walls had been ivory white, but were now yellowed and stained with brown water marks, grime crusting over the corners of the room and edging onto the unwashed people. 

With the heat, the smell of the bodies festered, and there was no hope of opening the window as it had long since been shattered. Taped over the sill was an awkwardly fitting metal cooking sheet to block out rain.

A few people lingered in the kitchen as Mako and Bolin set to work assembling the ingredients Shui had handed them. The two of them climbed onto a stool before the two eye stove and leaned over the ebb of heat from the burners. Mako struggled to cook and ward off his hunger at the same time, pressing his knuckles into his stomach to keep it silent so Bolin wouldn't pester him about food. 

Halfway through assembling the meal, Mako realized it would not come out well: the noodles were stuck and burning in a sauce that turned thicker and browner with each second. He tried to push the food around, mimicking food vendors from the streets. 

"Are the noodles supposed to break apart like that?" Bolin asked, chin digging into Mako's shoulder as he spoke.

Mako shrugged his free shoulder, reaching across the stove for a charred wooden spoon, and tried to nudge the noodles from the bottom of the frying pan. They stuck and jerked as he pried them free, mashing them into small dashes rather than long, hair-like lines. Once most of the food was free from the pan, he declared the meal done.

"I don't think Chou will like it, Mako."

Mako jumped from the stool and held out his hand to help his brother down. He kept their hands clasped together as they walked through the apartment, weaving around sleeping bodies and men and women that had their eyes slightly open, heads bobbing from shoulder to shoulder.  

The bedroom door was open just a crack, the buzzing, dying umber lights of the living room diving into the dark. Mako pressed his face against the crack, nudging it forward and closing an eye to peer inside.

The neon lights outside the window pulsed white and pink, throwing blinding color onto the passed-out bodies in the room. A large man was close to falling off of the tattered armchair in the corner on which he slept, while the rest of the four people in the room lay in random places on the floor. On the bed, hidden under the covers, someone moved out of time to the flashing lights. A foot stuck out from under the blankets, toes painted a chipped red, slithering back up and drawing more of the bare leg out.

Mako felt his heart spike and he shut the door.

"What? What is it?" Bolin asked. 

"Nothin', they're busy," Mako said. He started to drag his brother back through the throngs of people on the floor.

"Oh. Can we eat the -"

"- No, let's just find a place to sleep for now." 

"But you haven't had dinner."

"I don't need it."

Bolin tugged on his hand and Mako stopped, stumbling over an arm belonging to a sleeping woman. 

"Bo!" 

"Mako," Bolin said, frowning. "You never eat."

His eyes locked on the baggy shirt covering Mako's stomach, hollow and draped over the sharp cut of his shoulders, swaying like a solstice flag tacked to a window sill. Mako panicked and heat flared into his hands until Bolin's eyes met his, tugging his hand away.

"Ew, your hand is sweaty," he whined.

Mako sighed and his stomach settled as he grabbed Bolin's hand back. "Yeah, it is. C'mon, let's go to bed."

"Where're we gonna -"

"The icebox. It'll be cool over there."

"Can I use the scarf as a pillow?"

"Sure."

The seam where the metal side of the icebox kissed the wall was crusted over, the linoleum floor dusted with crumbs like the powder lining the bottom of a tapped-clean ashtray. The scarf was taken from Mako's neck and passed off to Bolin. Mako wedged himself into the corner, all sharp edges butting up against the chilled icebox, and opening up his arms for Bolin to settle down.

"Here, put your head on my stomach," Mako said. "It'll be comfier."

Bolin laid down, pressing his head into the hollow dip of his brother's stomach, the back of his neck bumping against the sharp jut of Mako's ribcage. The weight collapsed his stomach, chasing the hunger from his mind, and he was free to shut his eyes. The dim buzz of the dying lightbulbs cast his eyelids in a weak burnt orange.

"Mako?"

He sighed and kept his eyes closed. "What?"

"What month is it?"

"July."

"The end of July?"

Mako opened his eyes and lifted his arms, crossing them over Bolin's shoulder. "What's this about?" 

Bolin rolled his head to look up at Mako, eyes wide. "Fu was telling me about spirits again." 

" _Again?_ Bolin…"

"No, this one's really scary! He told me about the lid of the volcano - one where bad spirits live."

Mako rolled his eyes and shut them again, dipping his chin down, missing the feel of soft red brush against his nose. "Bolin, it's not real. Just go to sleep."

"The volcano opens in the summer on really hot days, and it stays open for…twe-twent--"

"Twelve?" 

"No, bigger. What's the bigger one?"

"Twenty." 

"Yeah! Twenty days," Bolin said, and he kept jostling under Mako's arms, hands waving through the air as he spoke. "So, Fu said - he said that the spirits of dead people come out when the lid's open. And then Heng said you can hear 'em if you press your ear to the ground."

"Don't talk to Heng anymore, you know I don't like him."

"And the good spirits, the ones that've got a family, they're ok. But the ones without a family, they're the bad ones. They steal things from living people. They come out of fog and smoke and fire - there's lots of fire."

"It's not real, Bolin. Just forget it and go to sleep."

"But Mom and Dad will become those evil spirits if we don't take care of them, right, Mako?" 

Mako opened his eyes to find that Bolin had dragged the scarf up over his face, pressing his hands to his cheeks, stretching the fabric tight over his nose and mouth. He smacked his little brother's hands away, tugging the scarf down to reveal Bolin's bewildered face.

"I dunno what you're scared of, 'cause we're not going to forget about Mom and Dad, alright, Bo?"

Bolin nodded. "Ok. Ok, we won't."

"Good. Now go to sleep." Mako leaned back and crossed his arms again, shutting his eyes.

He felt Bolin move, more pressure bearing down on his stomach, the shell of his brother's ear pressing against his coat. Small, wiry arms wrapped around his middle, squeezing tightly - Mako held back any complaints, knowing that it made Bolin feel safer, and that his grip would slack as he drifted off to sleep.

"Your stomach is making weird noises," Bolin whispered, his breath stifling hot and soaked up by Mako's coat, digging into his skin.

"Then don't press your ear to it," Mako muttered, tipping his head against the icebox. "Use the scarf to cover it up."

"Ok. Good night, Mako."

"Night, Bo."

\---

Steam rose off of the hot city streets in the waxy amber sunrise, lamp posts dripping with fat, fresh raindrops that blinked with light as they fell. Mako clutched his sweaty hand around Bolin's, feeling his eyelids, puffy and greasy with sleep, bunch as he looked up and down the road. 

Bolin yawned, a soft beat of breath, eyelashes crinkling as he rubbed his eye.

"It's early," he mumbled.

Mako nodded. The steam layered over the summer hot asphalt and climbed up around their waists, hiding in the air but sweating under their clothes, raking through their hair. The wet heat begged for entrance into the pores of their skin, and Mako remembered Bolin's story of evil spirits, minds laced with the poison of possession. His fingers tightened around his brother's and he jerked Bolin's arm as he started walking across the street.

Bolin stayed silent in the mornings, wincing against the glare of the sun in his eyes that were crusted over in the corners, which Mako took upon himself to wipe away. His heavy walk was full of straight legged stomps that trailed behind his older brother, shooting vibrations up Mako's legs and into his spine. All the while Mako kept his hand warm, even in the summer, just to keep Bolin awake.

By the time Mako was violently kicking away the second board in a fence blocking an alleyway shortcut, Bolin woke up. 

"What are we doing today?" he asked.

The dull thuds and back knocks of the loose board deepened, and Mako lifted it free, knocking it to the side. He wiped the sweat from his brow and waited for Bolin to duck through before answering.

"Finding food. I'm hungry, and I bet you are too."

Bolin nodded. "Yeah. Where are we going?"

"Takai Park."

"To the Sunahari Temple?"

Mako shook his head. "Nah, we have the money to make it to the dosa stands if we hurry up before the rush. C'mon."

With the promise of a hot meal, Bolin picked up his feet as they cut through alleyways to reach the fine streets of the Takai Park neighborhood.

The sun was just poking through the gaps in the buildings, blinding with orange light that bled into the air with each step across a sunbeam, blooming in a halo. Mako squinted against the glares and Bolin shut his eyes, letting his older brother guide him over gritty wet sidewalks around towering buildings where golden dragons dripped down the corners. The sidewalks were only sparsely dappled with splotches of red roofs over street carts, men and women with amber eyes slicking hot sauces over fried food, passing it off to early rising businessmen and women heading off to work. 

It wasn't often that they had enough money for breakfast, but Mako had felt the dull roar of his stomach beg for something hot since the moment he woke up. Today had to be an exception.

The woman at the stand they landed at gave them two small packets of coconut chutney without looking Mako in the eye as she passed off the food - a spare dessert of pity for the two filthy boys.

Mako pocketed them with a smile, and wished more people expressed their pity with food.

Bolin held the dosa close to his chest, fingers pressing into the paper tea doily encasing the food, turning it translucent with grease. Mako walked down the street with his hands in his pockets, feeling the cool touch of the chutney packets against his sweaty palms. The sun climbed higher into the sky to wake the rain water from the street with it, turning the fresh morning air humid.

"It's a nice day," Mako said.

Bolin nodded. "Yeah. Can we get wet if it's hot?"

"Maybe, as long as you don't cry the whole way over to the Eastern Water Tribe."

"I don't cry!"

Mako smiled and rolled his eyes. "Last time we went, I had to carry you because you couldn't make the walk!"

"I was tired!"

They bickered playfully as they left Takai Park, towards the less busy side streets that connected them to the Packing District. The buildings started shrinking, turning dilapidated and boxy, windows fogging up sea green and cracked with gaping holes. The land sunk into the shallows of Yue Bay, boat bottoms scraping the black muck ocean floor, the dock planks laid together with bunching threads of dry wood that splintered in the morning sun. The world laid bare around them like the bony skeleton of a fish carcass washed ashore and stunk of sun bleached fish scales. Steam swirled on the cracked, grey pavement. 

The sun climbed into the sky, warped and liquid like the pulpy insides of a fresh blood orange. Its heat sunk into Mako's hair like a pot of boiling water had been tipped onto his head, sweat seeping down from his hairline and curling under the collar of his shirt.

The world was quiet. No boat motors kicking to life with the stench of gasoline and salt, shouting fishermen with their crusted leather boots clanking down the docks; only the soft morning coos of seagull-pigeons sounded off from the abandoned buildings.

"Mako?" Bolin said, tugging on his brother's sleeve. "Who's that?"

He turned back to look at the flat, wide mouth of the street that fed the asphalt lot. Copper red figures quivered out of the steam, the sun crisping them up into a trio of two boys and a girl, solid and brittle. The dry cracks in the pavement revealed themselves under the heat and as the group of older kids walked closer, the scars on their bodies became clear, a tan silk sash tied around the waist of the shortest boy. 

They stopped just a few yards away to keep a field of barren asphalt between them, sharp eyes staring at the food clasped in Bolin's hands.

"Bolin," Mako said. "Don't be scared."

Bolin whimpered, the paper doily crinkling between his fingers.

Mako stretched his fingers, curling them into formation, letting the older kids know that he was a firebender. The shaggy, long hair on his scalp soaked up the sun overhead as lava boiled in his stomach, heat flooding to every inch of his body, bones igniting flaming ember orange and black.

"Is that dosa?" the girl asked. 

The brothers stayed silent.

"We can just find out, you know," the boy with the tan sash said.

A flame spat into the sweaty palm of Mako's hand. The sash boy and the girl rolled their wrists, and the ground moved with them.

The world was burning hot and slick with humid air that stunk of fish and car exhaust. Moving burned and Mako wanted to sink himself into the ocean as the earthbenders stepped forward with their hot city pavement, ready to pound him and take his food. 

The fight didn't last long. They attacked Bolin first, and Mako could only hold them off for so long until dust settled over Bolin's body, and he was pushed to the ground to scrape his hands and knees. Mako only had the time to help Bolin sit up until he heard slapping rubber soles hit the pavement before tearing away after them. 

He ran halfway up the street until he finally scorched the back of the tallest boy's shirt. The two earthbenders rounded on him, slamming his body against a brick wall with a thin wall of asphalt, and bowling him over until he laid flat on his back, panting at the lemon colored sky.

Mako waited until they left before he peeled himself off of the sidewalk. Trails of sweat curled down his hollow cheeks from his wet, matted hair speckled with street grit. The blood from the cut on his temple, beading out of the scrapes on his palms, mixed with the sweat to drip onto the street in pale pink.

His head throbbed as he jogged back to Bolin. His little brother was left muffling his cries into his arm, face glistening with tears, snot, and blood. Mako searched Bolin's scalp for hidden cuts, patting him down and poking his arms to find hidden injuries, before he wrapped his arms around his head into cradle him in a hug.

"It's too hot," Mako said. "Let's go to the docks, ok?"

Bolin nodded into his chest, letting out a chalky cough. "Ok." 

\---

Bolin sniffled as Mako dragged the razor from under the curve of his skull, fingers pressed into the cushion of his hair. His hands came away from the ink tangles of his brother's curls with wet brown stains. Bolin's hair used to be a fresh, dry black that never smudged or smeared; now he was wet and shivering under the hot sun and bleeding into the wood pulp of the dock like fresh parchment.

The strands clung to Mako's hands, causing him to stop to kneel over the edge of the dock and wiggle his hands in the water. He watched the strands of Bolin's hair float along the slow rolls of the bay surface, catch the light, and turn to pure gold knots that attracted minnows like fishing line.

The sharp coo of seagull-pigeons chorused on the docks beside them. The hollow _thunk_ of rickety wooden and metal traps slapped against the water, bubbling before sinking to the hard bottom of the sea, fishermen yelling foreign words about _currents_ and _red tide_ over the dull whisper of waves. The world sounded on as Mako listened to the soft scrape of hair cutting free in jagged chunks and slipping soundlessly to the dock.

Bolin's thin neck curved gracefully like a baby bird's, the shine of his wet scalp dappled with grey like pepper flakes inside a glass shaker. The skin on the back of his neck was freshly pale, already pinking under the sun. 

"Alright. I'm done," Mako said, walking off to the edge of the dock to wash the razor in the water.

He turned when Bolin did not join him. His little brother sat with his thin body hunched over his bleeding knees, staring off at some point on the dock, turning mindless like the adults in Triad apartments with needle scars in their arms and black teeth. Bolin caught his staring and Mako jerked his head away, sucking down a breath, and leaning over the dock to shove his head underwater.

He came back up with a gasp and started pawing his fingers against his hair, combing it to fall over the downward curve of his head. He found the razor on the dock and started cutting from the nape of his neck. 

Bolin joined him soon, and Mako watched out of the corner of his eye how he leaned over the dock to catch the flickering reflection of this new boy on the surface of the bay.

"It looks good," Mako said.

Bolin dragged his arm under his nose, the sunlight catching his wet, clumped eyelashes. "Uh-huh."

The motors of the sparse boats along the dock spat and rumbled into life, kicking off from the shore and cutting a wide, flat wake across the water. Mako watched his reflection become corroded with white foam as his rough hair fell into the water.

\---

The evening felt cooler with the city breeze slipping over their bare heads and necks. The world was lighter, the summer less heavy, and the day's heat didn't fester under heavy layers and eek out in rolling drips of sweat in the night.

Mako had gone on the numbers run Bolin had to complete that night, taking most of the business as Bolin slowly walked with him with his knees locked so as to not upset the fragile scabs forming on his skin. They stood together at the door of Arak's new apartment in the Eastern Water Tribe neighborhood, both their pockets stuffed with paper tickets and yuans.

The door tugged open and Mako quickly swept under Arak's arm, Bolin following after him, ending up in a small kitchen.

"Hey, you boys look sharp!" Arak said, stepping forward and instantly clapping his hands over both of the brothers' heads, rubbing his palms against the scratchy remains of hair. "You guys join the Air Acolytes today?"

Mako shoved his hand away, nose curling. "We got jumped."

"What? By who?" 

"Some kids," Bolin said, head picking up as Arak's hand lifted. "Two of 'em were earthbenders."

Arak followed after Mako as he walked up to the icebox, forcing open the sticky lid and leaning over the edge to scramble for some food. He would pay Arak back later. 

"Older than you?"

"Arak, get back in here!" a voice, slow and deep, sounded from the other room. Mako guessed it was Sang.

"The kids are here, they got mugged!"

"Aw, hell," Sang said, followed by the squeal of chairs against hardwood, heavy footsteps; Sang popped his head out from behind the door frame. "Anybody we know?"

"I think they were fourteen," Mako said, voice echoing in the tinny icebox. His fingers started to grow numb from the cold as he sifted through melting blocks of ice and frozen, raw chicken. "Two boys and a girl, the shortest boy wore tan sash."

"Dai Li," Arak said, and Mako could hear the fold of his smile in his tone. "New recruit. We have a few days to find him."

Mako found a cardstock container of noodles and lifted himself from the icebox, slamming it shut and wordlessly handing the food off to Bolin first. "You don't  have to do that."

"Hey, you work for us, kid," Arak said with a shrug.

"So?"

"We look out for our own," Sang said from the doorway. 

Mako caught his eye, staring at the man's blank expression as he focused on lighting a cigarette. He remembered the alleyway behind the jewelry store, leaving men behind to be picked up by the police and tossed into jail.

"What happened to those guys on the jewelry run?" Mako asked. "The ones we left."

Sang lifted his head and the flame hovering at the tip of his fingers flickered as he waved his hand through the air, as if clearing smoke. "They were in the cage for a night and we posted bail."

The words hung in the air as Mako stayed silent. Sang's eyes flickered into a roll before he pursed his lips around his cigarette again, ducking his head to light it.

Mako felt his palms sting and his wounds throbbed with blood, but the problem wouldn't happen again. Bolin had a few scrapes but he would never be soaked and pink with blood, hungry in the street, so long as those kids knew better.

Sang billowed smoke from his nostrils and turned back into the main room.

Arak cupped his hand over Mako's head again, and he tipped his head up to meet Arak's bright eyes.

"We'll get them, Mako, don't you worry about it. Now c'mon, let's check those tickets."

His rough palm slipped from Mako's head, and he watched Arak saunter out of the room. Bolin fell into step behind him with his hands shoving egg noodles into his mouth, content and happy with a roof over his freshly shaved head.

Mako rubbed his threadbare hand over his head and followed them both.


	6. Dark was the Night

Words were tricky; they looked sharp and charcoal-dry, stale and scratched into yellowed pages that still had imprints from the printing press warping them, smelling like chalky dust and glue. Mako had held books a few times in his life, always secretly gutted and replaced with things he could understand: either re-laced with lines of code for pickups and drop-offs, or hollowed out and stuffed with brown paper bags that smelled of incense. He never had use for words.

Arak and a handful of other Triads thought otherwise. Bolin sat at the kitchen table, leaning against Arak’s arm as the older man wrote lines of nonsense on a familiar brown paper bag. At his side, a long pipe burned with silky black tar stuffed in its maw.

He wrote lines of childish poetry -  _owlcat and dog fight, mother and father love baby_  - and slid the bag to Bolin along with the pencil. As Bolin copied his words, Arak inhaled his smoke and rested his head on the table to let the high wash over him.

Bolin took to words the same as he took to anything, with eager, gap-toothed smiles and rough hands. He whispered the words out loud as he laid them down with shaky lines, a handling that Arak slowly began to mimic as opium gummed up his bones.

Mako sat at a low table in the other room of Arak’s apartment, leaning against a thin pillow, partially listening to the men around him discuss the renovation of a nightclub. He kept leaning back against the wall to look through the open doorway into the kitchen, watching Arak slump on the table as his mind grew heavy with smoke. All the while Bolin’s back curved, as if the new knowledge in his head was making it impossible to hold up, until he rested it against the table.

“Mako. Hey,  _Mako_.”

He jerked his head and found Sang staring at him.

“Yeah?”

“C’mon, let’s talk on the balcony,” Sang said, standing and cupping his hand under Mako’s arm, forcing him to his feet.

Mako was accustomed to shoves, knocks to the back of the head and rough fingers around his shirt collars guiding him. It didn’t mean that he had to like it, so he elbowed Sang’s leg, effectively shoving him away. He knew where the damn balcony was.

He pushed open the folding door and stepped out into the cool, autumn air. The apartment was only on the sixth floor of a ten story building just on the edge of the Eastern Water Tribe, hidden far enough from the heart of the borough where the Red Monsoons dwelled. It still dripped with a culture Mako had seen only glimpses of: animal skins on stretchers fitted in windows, women shaking out furs on balconies, people wearing sleeveless shirts in the middle of fall.

It was cold there, with the wind whistling through the streets and blue streaking down buildings like frozen drips of ice. The sun shined brilliantly across it all, flat lays of light all pale against the frigid colors the people of the Water Tribe brought with them, like a winter morning after snowfall. Mako could say he liked it.

“What do you want?” Mako asked, leaning against the building as Sang stood opposite him at the balcony railing.

Sang brought a cigarette to his lips, and the wind picked up the candy red fabric of his coat, flapping around his lean, black-decked frame, looking like a candle flame flickering violently against a breeze. While Mako struggled to stuff all the loose, baggy fabric of his coat against his body to keep the wind from taking it, Sang turned his back with a smooth twist of his heels. He curved his spine over his cigarette to light it, then placed his hands in his pockets, completely stilling in the wind.

Mako wondered how he did it, how he was able to stop fighting and stay calm even as the wind kept pouring down the street.

“Got a job for you,” he said, voice warped by the cigarette. “Down at the docks. The pay’s better than anything you’ve ever got and everybody seems to think you’re a smart kid.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Keep lookout for cops, count cash, the usual stuff,” Sang said, looking out at the city.

“Then what makes the pay better?”

Sang shrugged. “It’s a drug pick up. I figured, since you run deliveries, you’d be fine with it.”

“Aren’t those - I dunno - dangerous or something?”

The older members, young guys with muscle and webs of scars marring old stretches of ink laced in their skin, ones that could crush their fist into the hood of a Satomobile with ease ran the deliveries. They were strong, able to cut down cops and lift crates on their shoulders. The muscle guys, not the kids.

“How old are you?” Sang asked.

“Twelve.”

He nodded, tapping his cigarette. “Everybody says you’re a good bender. You might not be a lightningbender but everybody says you can hold your own.”

Mako nodded, looking away to stare down at the street below. Blue flags stretched from the window sills they were tied to, snapping on the breeze.

“You’re a lightningbender, right, Sang?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“How’d you learn?”

The wind calmed for a moment, lifting the blue flags high in soft waves frozen in time, the world slowing to a stop.

“My brother taught me,” he said, tone flat and offering nothing more.

Sang took a long drag on his cigarette, blowing the smoke forcefully from his nose.

“You got a brother, right?” Sang asked, and the world caught up with itself again.

“Yes. Bolin.”

“Yeah, right, Bolin,” he repeated, nodding, but Mako knew Sang had no idea who his brother was. “Well. The money would do him some good, huh?”

“Yeah…I guess so,” Mako said. He picked up the end of his father’s scarf, running the tattered fabric through his fingers. The color was wearing and the stains were sinking in, faint splotches he could only see if he cared to look. “Alright, sure. I’ll work the docks.”

“Good man,” Sang said. He finished his cigarette and tossed the butt over his shoulder, and Mako watched it fall from the gaps in the balcony, down into the street to be swallowed by the blue sea of flags.

—-

Dawn was quiet, the silent, waking stretch of the ocean rolling across the harbors like a yawn. The world unfurled and rolled over at six in the morning, the city lying on its back with eyes crusted shut with sleep, and while it was docile in clean white sheets, Mako walked the streets with his chin tipped up. He could see the fingertips of the sun smear pink and orange across glass and metal, the air brisk and sharp.

The men at the docks worked with no shame in the still lingering shadows of night, talking loudly, dipping handkerchiefs into rounds of gummy opium to fold and tuck into their pockets with light laughter -  _don’t tell Zolt_. Morning belonged to criminals with dimpled cheeks and sticky fingers.

Mako was only told to count yuans. A man handed him a burlap sack stuffed with them, banded sloppily and crinkled like the curled leaves of red cabbage, peeled pointless and bitter. He took the sack, gripped in one hand and looked down at the dewy wet asphalt where he guessed he was meant to work.

The crates at the docks, some metal and rusted, others ash dry wood, towered like skyscrapers all around him. He caught a pair of men sitting at the top of a stack, sharing a cigarette, their faces and shoulders painted warm with sunlight.

He found his own tower of rust and climbed, the sun against his skin like warm hands smoothing his hair, rubbing his back,  _time to wake up, Mako_.

He saw the officers file in from the street, impossible to miss as the sunlight dipped lower and the metal of their uniforms sparked like the shifts of waves on the bay. Others saw them first and sounded the call before water and earth were stolen from the sea and ground to fight for the morning again.

Mako tried to stuff the yuans back into the sack, climb down the other side of the crates unseen, but an officer drenched in saltwater slung a wire cable around his wrist like a rabid dog’s teeth biting into his skin. The sack fell with a quiet, papery thud as Mako fell to his knees on the ground.

Slippery wet hands replaced the cable for a moment before jagged, crude metal bound both his wrists before him. A cable was attached to the junction between his hands and he trailed behind the officer in his light-dappled uniform to the cruisers.

“He can ride in the front,” one of the officers said, as Mako watched as the men he had arrived with were shoved into the back of the cruiser.

The drenched officer opened the cruiser door and fitted his hands under Mako’s arms.

“Hey, wait - what are you  _doing_  -!” Mako shouted, kicking once and just missing the officer’s gut.

He was dropped instantly to his feet and he stumbled. He heard an officer behind him snort with a short laugh, while the one that had tried to lift him glared.

“Young man, I was escorting you into the vehicle,” he said. “Now let me help you again.”

He moved to pick him up once more and Mako darted away.

“I don’t need your help, I can do it  _myself_ ,” he seethed, and placing his bound hands on the passenger’s seat cushion, he pushed himself up to get his feet on the lip of the doorframe. He felt stupid, wiggling his way into a sitting position, but it was better than being lifted by a dirty cop.

—-

Sitting on the bench in a hallway deep in the police station, Mako saw an officer playing with a scrap of metal, crushing it in her fist and laying it out as thin as possible over and over again. He felt the same as the scrap: forced between some guiding hands and pressured into thinness. His hands stilled dangled between his knees despite the release of the cuffs, trying to keep his shoulders together to collapse himself into the small space he was given in the station.

He watched Triple Threats ushered in and out of rooms, a few waving to him with small smiles, others talking to officers as if they were old friends from all the arrest charges they had racked up over the years. Most officers were hostile and shoved their palms into spines to knock them forward -  _pick up the pace, we don’t have all day_.

Heels on metal announced the return of the social worker in charge of Mako, holding a manilla folder stuffed with thick bundles of paper. She instantly bent down to her knees, placing a hand on the armrest Mako sat against: trying to be friendly, trying to gain his trust, but shifting just too far off to the left to really care.

“Alright, we can’t place you in an orphanage right now,” she said. “They’re too full. The officers are going to place you in a cell all to yourself for the night, ok? Just until a spot clears up in another orphanage or foster home. How does that sound?”

Mako glared at her and she pat his elbow.

“I know, hon, it’s hard. You’ll have two officers with you all day until we can get you where you need to be. And you’ll get a full meal!”

He bit his tongue, remembering the taste of jook laced with wiggling maggots and reminded himself:  _don’t say anything, and they can’t get you with anything_.

The woman stood up and held out her hand to Mako. He crossed his arms and stepped off of the bench, looking up at her expectantly. He watched her smile fade, the curl of her fingers as her kindness slipped through them, wasted on another child that didn’t want the cruelty she called help.

“Right. Follow me, then,” she said, and started walking down the hallway.

The cell was near another entrance to the station, a single room of iron bars much smaller than the cells Mako had been shoved into with other criminals. The slab of metal that was meant to serve as a bench was covered in a small blanket and pillow, converted into the world’s coldest bed - even the basement of the Triple Threat Headquarters served better with bales of cotton used for transporting liquor down from the mountains as a silencer.

The social worker stayed until Mako was ushered into the cell, and he watched at the officer with her pulled a set of keys from his belt.

“Is that really necessary?” she asked.

The officer nodded, glancing down at Mako before leaning close, whispering something about  _firebending_ before the tumbler clicked dully in the lock.

—-

He sat on the blankets and looked out at the officers sitting behind the front desk, bored and flipping through paperwork, tongues curled against their lip as they struggled to improve their metalbending on pens.

He stretched out on his back on the bench, trying to find ways to pass the time, trying to remember the last time he was ever really alone -  _the day at the hospital when Bolin was born, running down to Dragon Flats when Mom and Dad died_  - and four straight years of Bolin and gangsters filled his mind.

He tried to practice his bending, tossing flames up at the ceiling and having them drop back down to burst into his palm, but the officers panicked.

“You can’t do that,” one of them said, hands on the bars. “No bending allowed in the cells.”

“I’m not gonna escape or anything,” Mako said.

“It’s the rules.”

Another officer took pity on him and walked up to the bars from behind the desk, holding a stack of pamphlets in his hand.

“Here, give him something to do,” the second officer said. He held out the pamphlets through the bars and Mako stood up to retrieve them. “Just something to keep you busy. If you set them on fire, though, we’ll have to lock you up for real.”

He winked as Mako took them. Mako said nothing and walked back to the bench.

The pamphlets were all government sanctioned public education services, aimed at teaching the general public about the constant dangers facing them day to day: ways to prevent theft, the dangers of opium, the threat of sexual assault. He picked this up from scattered words he saw daily, scrawled across brown paper bags and notes tucked into his hand for work, characters like  _opium, whore, hit_. Mako wondered who needed this information. He knew these words better than any others.

He flipped past the pamphlets, laying them out on the bench, before finding one made of red paper and black ink so thick that it raised against the surface when he ran his fingers over it.

On the front was the image of a hand, two fingers pressed together and pointing out, as a cartoonish bolt of lightning struck the top of the page.

 _Firebenders control_  a word he didn’t know, a power he didn’t know, but he knew Sang with his calm and the hushed reverence men dressed in fire used when they discussed lightning.

Curious, Mako opened the pamphlet, and leaned back against the wall. He poured over the crude drawings of men with top knots and pointed boots stretching their arms across like a flagstaff, wearing the pride of their element as it crackled from their skin to sear the page that turned them sharp and ugly. The text was bold, terrified of itself and danger it warned the reader against. Mako knew that it held more than frustration and confusion for him. It held answers.

He tried to piece together what he did know -  _fire, firebender, triad, Fire Nation_  - with what he didn’t, struggling to fill in words full of technique and breathing.

He whispered the words as he read, feeling them in his mouth like pearls, trying to hear patterns and hoping his mind would catch up with the text. He taught himself firebending, after all; reading shouldn’t be any more difficult than that. Besides,  _everybody said he was a smart kid_.

But the words stayed still. They never lifted from the page anymore than the thick ink allowed, never tasting like tarred poppy seeds but like charcoal, dry and powdery on his tongue. He hated it.

He crushed the pamphlet between his hands and contained the heat there, letting a single wisp of smoke slither from the gaps in his fingers, feeling the paper slowly fall to ash. It felt like holding a ghost.

The officers thinned metal with thick skinned fingertips and light, easy smiles.

He wished the officers had handed him thick textbooks from the Beifong Metalbending Academy. He brushed the ash from his palms and thought of Bolin tasting iron in his mouth, weighing heavy in his head, molding the world to whatever he needed.

Mako ached.

He stacked the pamphlets into order, tucking them under the metal slab of his bed, and shut his eyes. He missed the comfort of another heartbeat strong against his own and thought of Bolin with nothing to hold, cold like him in some forgotten corner of the Triple Threat headquarters.

He hoped it was better than jail.

—-

A rough hand shoved Mako awake the next morning. He rolled onto his back, feeling sleep like grease slick on his eyelids, looking up at an older officer with a rough face and bulging eyes with spidery red veins swimming pink in the whites of his eyes.

“C’mon, kid, your uncle’s here to pick you up,” he said.

There was a small, forgetful lift in his chest, an uncle with eyes like his father or mother finally coming to collect his nephews before the officer shoved him again for not moving quick enough. Dreams melted like thick beads of wax and pooled at his feet if he let his mind dwell too long, and they were better cleared away.

He followed the officer out of the small side entrance where his cell had been located, shadow stretching from the station and down the steps, stopping just before the cruisers lining the street. Mako winced at the sudden brightness of their metal roofs. By the traffic in the streets, he guessed he had spent 25 hours in jail, watching people move in windy shifts like loose leaf newspapers, heading off to work.

Nobu stood at the middle platform of the high steps leading to the station. He smiled a crooked grin and slapped the officer’s shoulder once he drew near, then reached down to tug on Mako’s collar.

“There he is, my little nephew,” he said, and Mako shoved his hand away.

Nobu laughed and turned back to the officer, hand dipping into his pocket and slipping out with smooth ease. “Thanks for the favor, Zheng. Got this stuff just the way you like it.”

The officer covered his hand with Nobu’s, and to passersby, it looked like a fast handshake. Mako caught sight of the small packet pressed into the officer’s fleshy palm, which he carefully slid into the pocket of his uniform.

One gram of opium cost 100 yuans if you knew the right people, people in jewel-colored silks and gold chains fat on their necks. A boy for a smudge of black on wax paper and Mako was unsurprised to find that this was his worth.

“Thanks, Nobu. Now get out of here before someone says anything,” he said, eyes flickering over every surface, widening at people walking down the street. “Oh - and the Chief wants to try more dock raids. Cut down until that blows over.”

“Got it. See y’round, Zheng.”

Nobu stuffed his hands in his pockets, watching the officer walk away, comfortable on the shadow of the station.

“How was the night?” Nobu asked.

He turned on his heel and Mako followed after him, down the steps of the station and onto the street, headed back to Headquarters.

“Boring,” Mako said, rolling his eyes.

When Nobu said nothing in response, Mako grew anxious - the streets were filled with the sounds of people walking on sharp heels, the air smelling of breakfast sweets lining side streets they walked past, his stomach aching not from hunger, but nerves.

“Hey, uh, Nobu,” Mako said. “You forgetting something?”

“Huh? Oh! Right, right, sorry,” Nobu reached a hand into his pants pocket, tugging out a stack of yuans thicker than any Mako had ever earned in one night. “There you go. Profits were cut because of the bust, of course.”

“No, I mean -,” Mako took the money, folded it into his jacket pocket, clasping it around his hand. “Thanks for the pay, but is Bolin ok?”

Nobu’s gait slowed and the onset of panic started; Mako stopped walking completely, his body slowing to a stand still in his bones, his blood, his skin waiting for a fuse to hit him and tell him where to explode.

“Uh, he was caught taking some stuff from Headquarters,” Nobu said, awkwardly scratching his jaw, avoiding Mako’s gaze. “Some spare change from one of the bigger guys. They tossed him out.”

“They  _what_ ,” Mako spat.

Nobu glanced down the street, body shifting to get away. Mako could feel his hands spike with warmth so he pulled them from his pockets for fear of lighting the money. He looked up and down the street, weighing his options - he would try Arak’s first, then Central City Station, hitting up all the places in between where Bolin could go.

He had no home to run to, no safe haven to keep Bolin, because as much as the Triad took care of their own, no one ever cared for one more grubby kid.

Mom and Dad had died in the street, a random hit, bloody and burnt and he stopped trying to make sense of it years ago. If they could die, anyone could,  _Bolin_  could die.

Mako started running.

—-

 _Find Bolin_.

The phrase ran through his mind enough times for the voice that originally sparked it became warped; he remembered his mother’s voice, with all it’s dry, ashen darkness crackling in her burned throat. Now, when he would pause to breathe, he realized the voice in his mind belonged to him.

Mako ran until his knees started to shake, driving pains in his chest stabbing even when he stood on a street corner, his only respite as he waiting among silk-covered legs to cross the road to run again. He could see his desperate breath curl into the air in front of him, the cold sinking into the sharp tips of his fingers and toes. His ankle twisted once and he fell to the sidewalk, palms skittering with grit under his skin. They joined the pebbles from four years ago when Mako started running for his life and never again had the time to stop.

He hopped trolleys and subway cars, stuffing yuans into the hands of cruel adults, clinging to the back of Satomobiles and drawn carts when he was shoved out on the street. His pockets hollowed out until he felt weightless and he was sure  _he_  was trailing behind the scarf around his neck.

The sun started to sink behind the buildings in Takai Park until the world was gilded, all kissed with golden fortune, save for Mako in his grey and red.

He slowed to a walk as the finely dressed adults reprimanded him, demanded to know what the rush was, _are you lost, are you trying to find your way home?_  He pushed them away and kept his eyes locked on the passing buildings, storefronts stuffed with silk dresses and gloves, silver watches with jade-encrusted lids, a woman’s voice crackling out of a gramophone - not home, not Bolin.

He spotted his reflection in the high shine of the plate glass first, before narrowing his eyes and looking into the cafe of the Teikoku Hotel. It truly was gilded, gold stamped into the walls, floors washed in the high shine of cream marble, flames held in ornate glass orbs at each table.

A shaggy headed scholar, hermitting under the table at the street front booth and sitting among a stack of books, looked up at Mako with bright green eyes.

Mako brought his palm to the glass, smudging it with the paleness of sweat and blood, his panting fogging into his sight. Bolin smiled and started talking, the sound cut off, but his hands were wild with excitement. He held up heavy, leather bound books with ribbon tassels marking the pages he had read.

Mako dragged his hand on the glass as he ran along the side of the building, to the front doors and slipping inside with a group of women dressed in short, shimmering dresses. He didn’t look at the lobby; he just rushed to the cafe, elbowing legs to shove himself inside and crawling on his hands and knees as he looked for Bolin.

“Mako!”

Bolin slipped out from under the table once he saw his older brother, clutching onto a book. Mako pushed it out of his hands.

“Hey! Mako, don’t -”

“You ok?” Mako asked, looking him in the eye as his hands searched his head for gashes, bumps, slinging down to his arms to check for sore spots and bruises, trying to find the markers of pain. Reading with his hands and eyes to gather the whole story of Bolin minus Mako.

“Yeah, I’m alright,” Bolin said, tipping his head up when Mako’s fingers dug into his soft jaw. “Your fingers are like icicles.”

Bolin’s pulse was steady, reliant, something Mako could time his life to. He tipped up the edges of his collar to find the uneven stitching fixed there by his own hand, all of it reading,  _Bolin’s alive_.

He sighed, the first real breath he felt since he started running again. Bolin stared up at him, mouth and eyebrows puckered with confusion. 

Mako gathered him into a hug, arms tightening around his little brother’s shoulders, head buried half in the scarf, half in inky black hair.

“I was really worried,” Mako whispered.

Bolin muffled,  _sorry_ , into Mako’s chest. 

He tried to wrap the apology around his chest like a blanket, something to soothe him like Mom’s hand palming over his hair, but found the tighter grip on Bolin’s small frame made his heartbeat calm - like  _Mom crashing to her knees on the sidewalk, gathering Mako into a hug, whispering, I thought I lost you in the shop, don’t walk off without me again, and his head pressed to her heart to hear it settle back to the thrum of bare feet against the earth._

Before Mako could smooth it over with,  _it’s ok, just, don’t let it happen again_ , he noticed a man in a suit walking towards them, flanked by two members of the nonbending police force.

“Bo, let’s go,” Mako said, pulling away and gripping onto his brother’s sleeve.

“Lemme get my books.”

“ _Bolin_ , now - “

He twisted out of Mako’s hand, diving under the table once more to meticulously stack the pile of five books he had with him. Mako tapped his fingers and stood still as he watched the men draw near, highly aware of the staring the rest of the patrons in the restaurant gave them.

“Ready!” Bolin chirped, struggling with the heavy books in his arms.

Mako grabbed the first three books at the top of the stack even as Bolin protested; clutching them with one hand against his chest, he reclaimed his hold on Bolin’s shoulder again and darted for the door.

He heard shouts behind him,  _stop, stop those kids!, who let them in here?_ , but kept running until the revolving door spat them out into the street.

It felt like stepping into another world, the way the open roads sounded fuller, stuffed with clacking heels on pavement, honking horns as Satomobiles congested the streets, running past it all down side streets. The hotel had been too fragile for them both, being no place for empty-pocketed boys with scraped palms and mops of dirty curls.

They stopped just on the border of Takai Park and the Eastern Water Tribe. Mako’s grip lessened on Bolin’s sleeve, pulling away to find dappled pinpricks of red where the heel of his palm had been. 

He dropped the books to the ground without caution, and started unraveling the scarf around his neck.

“Hey!” Bolin shouted. “Those aren’t yours, you gotta treat ‘em gentle!”

Mako nodded, half listening, as he looped the scarf around both his and Bolin’s shoulders, tying it off with a knot he made up with no secret slip like his father’s.

“Where’d you get those, anyway?” Mako asked.

“The library,” Bolin said. He fondly looked down at the pair of books in his arms, running a finger over the smooth top of pages, scratching his nail against them. “I went there when I was walking around, looking for you. Did you know they just let you take books and read ‘em?”

Mako snorted with a laugh, bending down to pick up the books again. “Yeah. That’s all libraries do.”

“These are better than Arak’s. Some of ‘em got pictures and everything.”

Mako nodded, humming as his response, and started walking back to the alley they had found as their home. Bolin walked with him, awkwardly bumping arms as the scarf drew them closer and closer together. The bigger they were, the harder it was for the scarf to keep them together.

For now, Mako didn’t mind the sharp jabs of Bolin’s elbows against his own. It was a reminder that he was alive, solid and sturdy by his side, tethered to him as Mako lead the way to Arak’s apartment.

—-

Bolin sat outside the door, scarf around his shoulders as he peered into another book. Mako took one last look at him before stepping inside the apartment, trying to remind himself that there wasn’t much trouble a ten year old could get into in a hallway. It was better than the alley, at any rate.

The ceiling of the apartment was ghosted over with smoke; heady, thin, with the smell of the city park. Earthy and dry with the stench of the city, sweet like rotting fruit and wet newspaper.

Arak sat back on his sofa with another man, thin arms slung around each other’s shoulders as they melted into the cushions, their gazes locked on the ceiling. Arak took a hit from the pipe Mako had seen him sucking on more and more, and he passed it to his friend, watching as the man smoked and Arak lazily dragged his thumb around the shell of the man’s ear.

“Hey,” Mako said, and Arak jumped, smacking his hand into the man’s head.

“Oops, sorry, babe,” Arak said to the man, before looking back at Mako with his eyes struggling to stay open. “Hey, kid, you there?”

Mako nodded, wondering how thick Arak thought the smoke was. “Yeah. Is Sang here?”

“Uh huh. Somewhere.”

“Thanks.”

Mako saw Arak kiss the man’s temple and rub his fingers through his hair as he left.

The only other places in the apartment left to check were the kitchen ( _no, when did Sang ever eat anything but cigarettes_ ), the bathroom ( _no, the door was open_ ), and the gambling room ( _no, just a handful of opium-laced fingers clutching mahjong tiles and sweaty yuans; Sang would never_ ). 

He found him outside on the balcony, cherry red coat just visible in the gaps between the folding screen that shaded the glass door. Mako stepped out to join him, amazed that he wanted to stay out in the cold night as the wind tore in strong gusts between the streets. Sang never moved from his position of leaning against the railing, looking down on the city as his cigarette twitched in his mouth, long stem of ash begging to drop.

“Hey, looks like you got out of the cooler ok,” he said.

Mako nodded. “Yeah. Got out yesterday.”

“Huh. Then why didn’t you come around sooner?”

“You don’t really care,” Mako said, meaning to be flippant; but the longer he watched Sang stare out at the city with a look of disinterest, he realized that he was right.

Sang smiled, and the ash fell from his cigarette. “Yeah, I don’t. Alright, so, what brings you to me now?”

“I want more jobs,” Mako said. “I want more jobs like the last one.”

Sang pulled his cigarette from his mouth, tongue licking his teeth as he stared down at Mako under his pinched brow. The curious look melted away fast as he brought the cigarette back to his lips with a quick shrug, turning back to the city again.

“Alright. I can hook you up with a new one for next week. Fuzzy on the details right now but I can tell you about it later.”

“You sure?” Mako asked. “I mean, I’ll be around, so.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sang waved him off, already lost to the city again. “You’re not goin’ anywhere, I know.”

—-

The alley blocked the wind well enough for Mako to consider a fire, the first one since early last spring that barely lasted with the wet cardboard kindling they managed to find. He had retied the scarf around both their necks again, leaning his head against Bolin’s as his brother curved over the book he had in his lap. He lazily listened to Bolin whisper the words as he tried to read them, cupping his hands into a sea of text and drinking in half as the rest slipped through the gaps in his fingers:  _the monkey was…born? born from a rock. An’ he…these ones say earth, fire, water, and air._

Mako nodded, looking down at the four characters Bolin pointed to, watching as he tapped his finger against them. “Is the monkey the Avatar or something?” he asked.

“I dunno. I dunno that word yet.”

Mako hummed and shut his eyes, burying his face into Bolin’s hair, drowning out the sound of his struggle. His stomach felt as hollow as his pockets; his palm resting against the dip in his bones like the feel of slimey silk, filled only with holes lined with unraveled threads like dead hair.

“Bo?”

“Yeah?”

“We don’t have any food tonight.”

“Oh.”

Bolin’s silence was heavy, weighing down on Mako’s shoulders and he pressed his face deeper into the tangle of black curls. Bolin’s fingers flicked the corner of a page back and forth.

“I can start a fire, if you want?” Mako said. He lifted his hand and pressed his fingers to Bolin’s cheek, feeling the chill set in there. “You feel cold.”

“Ok.”

They searched the alley for garbage, anything that could be stuffed into a trashcan and lit. The cans rattled as they brushed against them, a tinny scratch of metal on metal echoing against the curve of their stomachs.

“Hey Bo, I think it was trash day last night.” Mako said, voice sounding bigger as he leaned over the lid of a can.

“Oh. Then, what’re we gonna do?”

Mako turned around, hands on his hips, as he scanned the alley again. The usual spattering of garbage still clinged to the ground, but like a layer of leaves in autumn, the undersides were wet and disintegrating.

He watched Bolin trot over to their camp and flip through his books again, bored already of the fruitless search. The dry slaps of pages falling against his thumb in thick chunks, crisp and light and thin. 

“Bo,” Mako said, drawing out his name, holding it cautiously. “Which book do you not like?”

“Uh…um, this one,” Bolin said, finger jabbing into the largest book he had. His nose wrinkled. “I can’t read it. It’s boring.”

Mako picked it up and looked at the spine, running his finger over the title indented into the cloth binding. _The Life of…_ Someone. Their name came with a title that began with an  _A_ , something Mako knew from the spelling of his own name. He pointed to the words following the title.

“What’s this one?” he asked.

Bolin narrowed his eyes. “Um. S-saved? I think?”

 _The Life of Aah-_ Someone:  _the Saved of the World_  didn’t have a nice ring to it. Mako opened the book and walked to a trash can, and started ripping pages from the bindings.

Bolin watched, eyes a little wide, as Mako’s hands pulled thick slabs of paper, ripping up threaded binding like strings of veins torn and bleeding ink. His silence thinned and he turned back to his books; Mako knew Bolin had no intention of returning them.

—-

More jobs meant more danger and more danger meant more fire, whether Mako could help it or not.

He stared at the blackened brick wall before him, sinking his palms towards the ground with a deep breath, thinking of another alley in Dragonflats that he nearly razed with another trash can fire long ago. His father wasn’t there to put out the flames anymore so Mako lifted his hands, curled them into fists, and sent another series of punches at the wall.

Over the dull roar of the flames and the faint sounds of night time filtering in from the streets, he could still hear Bolin pouring over the last of the books he got the other day;  _the monkey met the Ahh…met the…and she was better at…earth, fire, water, and air and…I think that word is Avatar?_

The fire felt good burning from his palms, small bursts of flames burning at their brightest, spitting across the bricks and fizzling away into the blue dark. His stomach felt drum tight against his bones, already empty from the rice he managed to score from his last job with Sang. Everything in him burned up quicker now, his food, his energy, but even through the fatigue his flames lasted. He had stopped questioning what he burned when he used them now.

“Mako! Hey, Mako!” Bolin sang. “C’mere, look at what I did!”

Mako stopped, catching his breath and rubbing the sweat from his face with his father’s scarf. He leaned over Bolin, looking down at the blank open pages of the book he was reading from. Scrawled all across it were charcoal scratches of Bolin’s name and copied words from the book that Mako couldn’t read.

“Great,” Mako said, rubbing his hand into Bolin’s hair. “You do all of these by yourself?”

“Uh huh. Mako, write your name! I wanna write it too.”

He tore a corner off a page, knicking the edge of a paragraph and taking the words with it. Bolin held it out to Mako along with the last nub of charcoal he had left.

Mako looked at the paper, and decided to fit his name under the words to keep it free from the print. He scrawled across the bottom and handed the paper back to Bolin.

Bolin’s eyes narrowed, head tipping to the side, and Mako imagined all the words tattooed into his head following the motion to weigh it down, ticking like uncooked rice.

“Mako, I can’t read it,” Bolin said.

He frowned, and took the scrap of paper back to look it over again. His hand was shaky, marks blurring down the page as his hand had smudged his name.

“Just keep practicing your name,” Mako said, curling the scrap into his fist. “It’s more important to know.”

“Alright, Mako,” Bolin sighed, looking down at the last chips of charcoal in his palm. 

Mako walked back to the wall, uncurling his hand to look down at the crumpled paper there. He unfurled it, thumbs accidentally dragging over the charcoal until his name couldn’t be read at all, just a hazy blur of grey like smoke breathed into a page.

“Mako, come look!”

He turned and let the paper flare in his hand, consumed by flame, edges black and turning paper into embers that drifted from his palm as he walked to Bolin.

Bolin pointed to the ground, where, carved in a shaky hand an inch deep into the stones, were the characters of his name. Mako could just see it in the dark from the light of the fire in his hand. Mako smiled.

“Hey, good job,” he said, and rather than rub his hand over Bolin’s head, he gently pushed his hair back. He remembered his mother doing the same thing and hoped that this was how he was supposed to act. “That was smart of you. Saves up paper ‘n’ stuff.”

“Yeah, and I get to practice bending,” Bolin said, leaning his head into Mako’s side. “I wish you could write your name with mine.”

“Maybe when I’m an earthbender.”

Bolin laughed, high and bright against the dark as Mako overturned the ashes in his hand, letting them scatter across the alley. 

“Alright, keep up the good work,” he said, patting his hand against Bolin’s cheek, and Bolin laughed again as Mako walked away.

Mako returned to the scorched wall, feeling his calloused, dried skin scratch as he brushed the ashes from his hands. He fell into position, tensing his bones until he could see his tendons shifting under his skin and the ache in his body ignited again. Mind dusted clear save for sharp, dry heat spilling from his mind, down into his hands.

Over the constant firing of flame against brick, Mako could hear Bolin writing across the earth, whispering his name with quiet pride.

“Bo…..lin. Bo-lin. Bolin.”


End file.
